[ROM 2.3.3 / SENSE 3.0] Virtuous Unity 2.39.0 based on Pyramid [26.09.11]

There are a lot of questions around why we’ve put Virtuous Unity on hold for the time being, so we’re going to give everyone the background on what transpired. This is going to be a long post, as we want to be as concise as possible, in order to paint the full picture of the situation.

It all began when new ROM was released, called Honey Unity, in the DHD forums. This ROM is completely based on Virtuous Unity. Everyone is well aware of our stance with ports/forks of Unity, as every single one of our original posts and website states, permission must be granted by our team, for which we have our reasons. Permission was not granted for Honey Unity.

Their "developers" have flipped-flopped on the truth numerous times themselves here, claiming permission was granted. The truth is, permission was requested but they received no response from us. Every one of us has a backlog of PMs on XDA (I get dozens a day, as do my peers). So, after an arbitrary period of time, the Honey Unity team simply interpreted no response to mean “yes”, which is asinine. If you ask a friend whether you can have or borrow something, via email or otherwise and your friend does not respond, it does not mean you assume yes and go ahead and steal it. That’s what happened here.

Now, this is not the first time Unity has been stolen, either in full or in parts, without permission from us. What made this situation different was how the developers and users within the DHD community responded. Our team made the request to have Honey Unity pulled, purely based on the fact that they had not received a go ahead from us. This is well within the rules of XDA (see section 12) and is simply common courtesy. They broke XDAs rules, despite the reminder from us being present everywhere possible.

One of the moderators on XDA helped us facilitate the request to have Honey Unity removed, which triggered a sickening sequence of events from the community. Rather than understanding that the ROM was breaking the rules, attacks began on both the moderator and the Virtuous development team. For us, this put into perspective there is an absolute lack of respect for the amount of work which has gone into Virtuous Unity and the sense of entitlement people in the community have to claim what they feel is theirs.

The attacks escalated for hours as the situation was playing out. Developers and supporters of the Honey team were in our IRC channel, completely disrespecting our team and disputing our right to require that permission be granted. Supporters went so far as to begin down-rating all of the Virtuous ROMs in the DHD threads and posting flames. The point of the matter is that not only was our work stolen; there was more support on the side of the thieves, than for us. It was at that point we made the decision to pull down all files and links for Virtuous Unity.

If there is that little respect for the effort which has gone into this ROM, which is unmatched by any project which any of us have ever worked on, what’s the point in continuing? For those who do not know, there are hundreds of man hours invested into this project. From building the tools to resize the proprietary binary m10 format, to resizing a qHD ROM end-to-end to fit perfectly into WVGA displays, optimizations to allow it to run on previous generation hardware, so on and so forth. Then, someone can just waltz in, copy any parts of it they want without permission and release it as their own? Add the final cherry on top, where when called out for stealing work, we are made out to be the bad guys. That is simply not OK with us.

This is why Virtuous Unity is currently unavailable until we figure out exactly how we want to proceed. Either there will be a set of changes which allow us to continue or this project will simply end. We have not decided yet but will let everyone know once we do.