[Malatesta]

Originally Posted by budney

I just would like to know the reasoning behind it.

Mostly legal jargon but they do have some reasoning. It was posted over at XDA in the announcement:

Originally Posted by Microsoft

Microsoft has limited redistribution policies in place for a number of products, from desktop applications like Office, to downloads such as Windows Media Player and Windows Live Messenger, to Windows Mobile products. The licensing terms for Windows Mobile products also varies between versions and is different for each device depending on the features included by the OEM. As you may know, Microsoft is dedicated to protecting its copyright and other intellectual property rights.

I do know XDA-developers.com is home to many device enthusiasts; however I’m not in a position to debate the legitimacy of any specific piece of software hosted by this site. We have received feedback from several sources on the software hosted by XDA-developers, including mobile operators with customers requesting support on “unofficial ROM images” and media agencies reporting on unreleased ROM versions to name a few. From this feedback, legal review of the sites content, and misconceptions; we concluded we should inform you of the actual Microsoft policies through my original email. These policies are consistent for all non-licensed channels.

We do appreciate the feedback you have given us in the past.

I can assure you we have teams focused on improving Windows Mobile developer’s experiences and if you have additional feedback I encourage you to use the Microsoft developer newsgroups or I would be more than happy to forward this on.

I regret that I’m the bearer of bad news, however we do appreciate your understanding of this matter and trust you will remove our content, including “ROM images” containing our content, as originally requested.