[VMG]

Why are large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature?

I always shiver a little if I have to dive into xda-forums, but this takes it to the next level. Puts all the actual hard working developers in a bad light.

[lambda]

I think its because they grew out of the phone ROM community, which pre-Android, generally meant hacking up a binary blob and distributing them on forums. This was never quite legal, but lots of people did it anyhow. Like any community build around legal grey areas, like Xbox and PS3 modders, there's a lot more anonymity, less professionalism, and the like, than there is, say in the free software world, where people are legally, and in many cases professionally, writing software to run on their own machines.

Even once Android came out, there are enough binary blobs, like the actual phone firmware, drivers, the Play Store, the Google Apps, and so on, that a lot of the mods are just redistributions of the binary packages with a few configuration changes and some custom software on top, rather than a rebuild from source of AOSP.

[raphman]

Could you elaborate on why this issue shows that "large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature"? As far as I can see, the developers trusted someone they should not have trusted. That is not necessarily a sign of being "unprofessional and immature", is it?

[tallanvor]

Any volunteer organization risks running into this at some point. --You generally don't have any sort of contract because you're not paying anyone.

I used to help run a convention, and one year the person who had designed the program book decided he deserved compensation and demanded a similar amount of money to let us use the design. We were left with only a couple of days to come up with a new design.

[tripzilch]

well if you look at the way the CM team handled this ( http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-re... ), at least that was exemplary professional and mature.

[drivebyacct2]

Something about a sufficiently large group of people and general idiocy.