HTC lawyers allegedly tell JMZ Software to remove any Sense-based ROM
While the details are still unclear on what exactly happened with HTCRUU, a tweet from @JMZ_Software says that HTC’s legal division has told him to remove any Sense-based ROM from his hosting, as well.
If the HTC legal team is getting into the business of shutting down modified distributions of Sense, that pretty much would be the end of development for any non-AOSP based ROM, and it might not be too much longer before one found the AOSP community drying up due to lack of drivers or legal threats from decompiling or reverse-engineering proprietary code.
We’ve reached out to JMZ to clarify what’s going on, so we’ll keep you updated later on if we hear anything. Hopefully, it’s just a lawyer who was told to shut down the RUU distribution site for using HTC’s name in the domain name, and they’ve gotten a little over-zealous, perhaps not knowing that historically Sense has been an open channel for developers. Indeed, doing this is like hitting a beehive with a baseball bat.
I’m not quite ready to throw on my F*** HTC T-shirt and go riding about town yet, as I haven’t even heard one complete side of the story. However, it’s getting reminiscent of the beginnings of that whole CarrierIQ debacle, where as opposed to dealing with the issue, they sent in lawyers, who evidently didn’t know much about what was going on, to threaten a developer.
It should be interesting to see how this plays out, and hopefully I’ll hear back at least from JMZ about what is going on. I doubt my HTC connections will be of much help, though.
[Twitter]Check out the rest of our Android coverage, including app reviews, Nexus news, and more at pocketables.com/android.