HTC & Open Design - Why not?

[scheel78]

I know I like hacking. If the phone came perfect out of the box I would be bored and not like it as much. It's more of a "look what I can make my phone do thing"

[Kalnel]

I think it has to do with the carriers wanting to maintain control over all the potential revenue channels.

The way carriers enable/disable features on these phones reminds me of the way Comcast enables/disables features on my cable box. I have a firewire port, ethernet port, several USBs, serial port, etc., and they're all disabled. Comcast doesn't offer any services that use these ports, but it's not in their interest to let me innovate, in case they find a way to monetize the features I might want in the future.

That may drive some people to other devices (Tivo, Android, etc.) and other people to hacking, but my bet is that 99% of users are never even aware of the potential in the devices they have. Instead they'll just wait for the next version/generation to come along.

[TurboFool]

The reasons are pretty simple and clear: Licensing and carrier restrictions. If the phone's easily hacked, it's easy to pop new OSes onto the device and violate the license HTC paid Microsoft for. And if the phone's easily hacked, then it's easy to get around whatever restrictions the carrier has in place, producing security and network utilization concerns for the carrier.

I'm not saying I like it, and I think if the OSes were open source like Android, and the carriers would simply switch to a model where we pay for an open pipe and the rest is up to us, we'd be better off. But given the current situation, this is how it is. It's not about HTC, it's about their licensing and carrier obligations. Companies like OpenMoko go a different route, and that model works great. But when you've got proprietary, expensive software that differentiates your phone from the competition more than just the hardware, or you've licensed such software, you have to protect it. Plain and simple.

Oh, and there is no ExtROM on the Raphael. The CABs are just in the Windows folder now. Clearly they learned from us and gave up on it.