If in fact they are one in the same...
The OpenCL kernels are the same.
Why is phoenix miner developmentally so behind Claymore? (OC stuff, Dual mine options, etc)
If one was just going to rip off claymore's work... Just rip it all off?
Because all miners work like this - miner asks pool what to do, miner tells GPU what to do, GPU does it, miner replies to the pool.
To tell GPU what to do you need to use different programming language. In fact its even a different program.
So the miner actually consists of two programs - one which deals with pool etc and another one which deals with the GPU.
Actually it's even more complicated if we do overclocking and monitoring.
But. Nothing matters more than that OpenCL kernel - this actually determines how big your hashrate will be.
Everyone can write overclocking/monitoring/pool interaction, but only handfull of people can implement OpenCL kernels, I do speak of "normal"(fast) OCL kernels, not some open source stuff you can find around the web.
And then why is phoenix (in my opinion) faster and more stable?
No idea. For me Claymore is stable. I don't know how stability can be more or less. It's just stable.
I would hate to be using a miner that was ripped off of claymore's. Competition is good, but not at this cost.
It's not the competion if we steal something and sell it for less.