This is a fun thing to read I have to say. I will agree with one thing that is being said here, the fees (efudd). I believe every developer should get paid. I have seen your firmware and thought of trying it. But the dev fees outweigh the rewards. Now this is honestly your choice since you did do work to make it work correctly. But a small one time use fee or a 0.5% could be considered more reasonable. Also the back door into your the miner shouldn't be there. Bitmain does it, and I wish I was smart enough to remove it, but I am not. Maybe that is something you could eliminate, for everyone including yourself. But this is just my 0.02 so it means nothing.
Thank you for your input. I do agree developers should get paid with that said, when I did try to do legit business with him on the fw he acted like an ass because I pointed out the control he had and I released a free version for batch 4 minis. He also led people on by offering a licensed version then pulls the license and says dev only from now on unless you have a large number of units. In my opinion at that point he realized he can profit more from dev only and didn't care about getting the miners the most out of the machines as he claims.
He accused me of trying to rip him off when I was asking legit questions for legit business and before I even considered looking into the fw. His actions led me to look into the GPL fw he started with and I then made a decision once I determined I had the right to change what I wanted. It is all in black and white in the GPL license terms as to how and when I can change his files. He needs to package his files as a upgrade without the original files, only his, because once he packages it with the GPL fw he has to follow the GPL terms the way he linked everything together. I am not demanding his source code which under GPL he is required to release for his 2.1 versions, in those versions he changed cgminer which is open source which he is required to supply the source code if requested.
I don't care about the money part of it and if people want to donate to him still that is great, if they want to donate to me for my work then fine too, but this isn't about the money, it is about getting the most out of the miner investment and being honest and forward with people who want to use the fw
No backdoors, no you pissed me off so I am shutting down your miner, and no random dev fee connections or failure to come out of dev mode.