@abill_uk

Communities work as long as people are willing to put in their free time. If enough people join forces things get done and things get better with more knowledge collected in wikis and on forums like this one.

Now imagine that said forum is littered with thread after thread of people complaining about problems and wanting help with said problems after installing an unofficial firmware upgrade. This takes a certain toll on the others, who didn't go for the perceived gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

If you fsck up and brick your N900, times are hard and you want to get helped but you're still the one who did the flashing. If you then move into the forum and generate work for others that didn't make the same choice, you'll end up with reactions. If you, to make matters worse, think that you in some way deserve this help you're up for a rude awakening.

In this I can understand ossipena's objection to comparing this reflash to installing from Extras-devel/Extras-testing. The Extras repositories represent the joint effort by the community to make the device better and to compare that to using, potentially, stolen code is to make very little of that effort.

With that said, I can agree on the attraction in installing the firmware. As long as the ones making that decision are clear on what they're doing. To argue "But, I didn't know it could ruin my device!" is no argument at all.