I don't mean that a bit of coding is a lot of effort in and of itself, just using an expression - though the code isn't the only thing here, there is testing, concept, the discussion, the git repository etc. - devoted to subverting someone else instead of competing.
I'm sure you are correct too that the income likely wont be severely affected. It's just principle for me, if I don't like the terms the proper action would be to use something else. In my experience, though limited, the speed increase in the software is about 2-3x what the fees for using it are. Still a net win for me.
As for forced fees, open source, etc. that reasonable, but anyone can make that choice when developing the software and when deciding what to use. If we don't like the software being proprietary or the implementation we can use something else.
Anyway, I'm rambling. I only wanted to through in my two cents on the subject. I wouldn't even care to try stopping anyone either way but I think it would be much better to compete with different ideas and such than to intentionally subvert something one doesn't like.
DogeEconomist, you're ragging on the only guy in this whole thread who posted his code and is upfront about it.
The a*s w*pe that started this thread and made the original NoDevFee executable is hiding what he is doing. Like I said before, I reverse engineered it and it sends dev fee to your wallet 9 out of 10 times. And the 10th time it secretly sends it into his wallet:
0x783231dEBa1FaFd90b4F146fDB21a374C29737fF. That's an example of behavior that is not OK with me!
I agree with most of what you said though, except couple of points:
1) First and foremost -- be upfront! Don't try to hide anything. I don't know who wrote that Claymore miner but it is heavily obfuscated to the point that every, and I mean, every antivirus flags it as malware. I can't even download it to my Win10 machine. Can all those AVs be flagging it as false positives? maybe. But who knows. We don't know for sure.
2)
There's a good indication that the author of the Claymore miner artificially inflates the hashrates it reports. Since there's no source code and he obfuscated the living crap out of that executable, there's no way to check if he's telling the truth. Sure, he did some work to develop it, but doing such a skeezy move as inflating the reported numbers is not OK! Also use some logic. If something is obfuscated, the computer will have to de-obfuscate it to run it and thus "waste" time. How would that be "faster" then?
3) Sure, I totally agree that one needs to be compensated for their work. But to what degree? Have you seen the balance on the claymore dude's ETH account lately. It's over a million US smackaroos. So did he make all that $$ by an honest coding work or by padding his hashrates and thus beating the open source (honest) competition that way.
The only positive thing about Claymore miner is that it supports dual mining, which to the best of my knowledge none of the open source miners do. (I might be wrong though.)
So that's my take on it.