As you probably heard yesterday, Geohot unlocked the latest baseband and is planning to release it on the 4th of November. This means that if you bought your iPhone recently or you upgraded the firmware by mistake you’ll very soon be free again to use your device with the operator of your choice.
For the achievement and financial compensation, Jody Sanders, who’s been selling illegitimately his unlock solutions, offered him $10′000 but Geohot decided not to take the money. He had already claimed he’ll not be doing this for money and today he officially declined it on his blog.
Why would he possibly do that ? well, he claims that accepting the money would be legitimizing this shady business and he also wants to get the message out that nobody should have to pay for jailbreaking:
I’m asking for everyones help on this. Our weapon is information. Get the truth out, that all iPhone unlocks and jailbreaks are free, and if you are buying something, you aren’t getting anything a simple google search couldn’t get you, and are probably funding someones crack habit.
He’s right, so many websites exploit people’s ignorance (or laziness?) and make money on Geohot’s and the Dev Team’s back.
Unfortunately the funny part is that the Adwords advertisements on his blog actually mostly link to these websites… Not too coherent right ?
[via iPhonejtag]
Ha! Only because the deal about the US$10.000 got too public. It was old news on the community, and he hadn’t declined the money any bit…
Took care of the adwords last night, google needs time to propagate
I really respect and appreciate George’s work. But I can’t help but remark how much he looks like Frodo Baggins from Lord of the Rings.
I’d also like to address geprieto’s post.
Why the hate? This guy has done the entire community a service. His time is worth something. Even if you are right and he considered taking the 10k (which I don’t assume is correct, by the way), so what?
Just like anybody else, he deserves to get paid for his work and frankly we all should be very grateful that he has been working on this.
It’s all a bit surprising how so many people have taken “sides” in the jailbreaking community. I respect the dev team too. But to be honest, my 3Gs wouldn’t be jailbroken today if not for George. I tried using Pwnage tool and kept getting 1604 errors. Finally, the advice I got from the dev team site was to use George’s solution to jailbreak the phone and then use my custom firmware (Created with pwnagetool).
Thank you George and don’t worry about the haters. I think a lot of them are clinically insane anyway.