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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

There is currently some controversy over this. See http://www.droid-life.com/2010/07/15/enough-with-the-efuse-t... .

I think the thing is that the hardware is _not_ meant to brick the phone, but there's still a dubious bootloader that kills itself when it sees a custom ROM. The good side to that is that if you can figure out how to fix the bootloader, things should work OK. I don't know, that's just what I get from that article, it's kind of hard to follow the whole thing here.

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Motorola's official response is that the eFuse device exists to disable the phone (aka switch to recovery mode) when unauthorized software is run, and _re-enable_ it when the original Motorola-approved software is installed. They claim that the phone is disabled only temporarily and not bricked. Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/motorola-responds-to-droi...

(Sorry, I couldn't find the original Motorola post)

I don't know what specific chip is used on Droid, but I remember that on Qualcomm chipsets you cannot change primary program loader at all (it is in the chip ROM) and after the fuse is blown in handset factory, the primary program loader checks, whether the secondary program loader is signed and refuses to load it, when the check fails.

So it really depends on SPL, what it allows to load and run. If it is strict in what it does, case is closed, buy something else.

And this is exactly why the GPL3 is necessary. Brick my device for modifying my GPL3 firmware? See you in court.

Of course, that just ensures that phone vendors will never ship (and thus never contribute to) any GPLv3 software.

We are a few years away from anything important being GPL3, but when that does happen, phone companies will have the choice between 1) starting out millions of man hours behind the competition or 2) letting highly-tech-savvy users install their own version of Emacs on the phone.

Most will pick 2.

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