I don't mean that a bit of coding is a lot of effort in and of itself, just using an expression - though the code isn't the only thing here, there is testing, concept, the discussion, the git repository etc. - devoted to subverting someone else instead of competing.
I'm sure you are correct too that the income likely wont be severely affected. It's just principle for me, if I don't like the terms the proper action would be to use something else. In my experience, though limited, the speed increase in the software is about 2-3x what the fees for using it are. Still a net win for me.
As for forced fees, open source, etc. that reasonable, but anyone can make that choice when developing the software and when deciding what to use. If we don't like the software being proprietary or the implementation we can use something else.
Anyway, I'm rambling. I only wanted to through in my two cents on the subject. I wouldn't even care to try stopping anyone either way but I think it would be much better to compete with different ideas and such than to intentionally subvert something one doesn't like.
DogeEconomist, you're ragging on the only guy in this whole thread who posted his code and is upfront about it.
The a*s w*pe that started this thread and made the original NoDevFee executable is hiding what he is doing. Like I said before, I reverse engineered it and it sends dev fee to your wallet 9 out of 10 times. And the 10th time it secretly sends it into his wallet:
0x783231dEBa1FaFd90b4F146fDB21a374C29737fF. That's an example of behavior that is not OK with me!
I agree with most of what you said though, except couple of points:
1) First and foremost -- be upfront! Don't try to hide anything. I don't know who wrote that Claymore miner but it is heavily obfuscated to the point that every, and I mean, every antivirus flags it as malware. I can't even download it to my Win10 machine. Can all those AVs be flagging it as false positives? maybe. But who knows. We don't know for sure.
2)
There's a good indication that the author of the Claymore miner artificially inflates the hashrates it reports. Since there's no source code and he obfuscated the living crap out of that executable, there's no way to check if he's telling the truth. Sure, he did some work to develop it, but doing such a skeezy move as inflating the reported numbers is not OK! Also use some logic. If something is obfuscated, the computer will have to de-obfuscate it to run it and thus "waste" time. How would that be "faster" then?
3) Sure, I totally agree that one needs to be compensated for their work. But to what degree? Have you seen the balance on the claymore dude's ETH account lately. It's over a million US smackaroos. So did he make all that $$ by an honest coding work or by padding his hashrates and thus beating the open source (honest) competition that way.
The only positive thing about Claymore miner is that it supports dual mining, which to the best of my knowledge none of the open source miners do. (I might be wrong though.)
So that's my take on it.
I'm not ragging on anyone really, just throwing my opinion out on the issue.
1. On the software being upfront, that is typical of any proprietary software - the point is to protect the code and such, not to share it. Regarding AV flagging it, that is typical of every mining software I've used so far. Even source code from open source software is flagged sometimes. The reason for that I believe is due to a handful of people using mining software illicitly on unauthorized machines with things like botnets, putting it on institutional or workplace systems, etc. It's not unique to Claymore's software at all. Since mining of crypto currencies is still a relatively small slice of the market share of AV software users it's easiest for them to just block it all.
(on my windows 10 machines I can download it. But I don't use microsoft's proprietary AV/defender most of the time.)
It's up to us to decide if we trust the software devs whether proprietary or open source. I don't personally know enough about software to determine what is safe on my own, I'm dependant on either trusting the developer or the community around it. Due diligence is always appropriate. I relied on feedback from here to decide upon trying cm and other options.
2. No idea if that's the case at all. I don't go by the hash rates reported by any software - except for in-house comparisons of configs and such. What I go by is what I'm paid for in accepted shares and over a semi-long period of time. At least several days of sustained use. In those cases Claymore has outperformed other options for me, so far.
3. To what degree is whatever is agreed upon by the parties involved. In the case of Claymore's software the terms are set out pretty clearly - the software is free to use but has a resource share to pay a percentage of it's use. Which can also be disabled on at least some of the versions whilst also reducing it's efficacy. It clearly states all that and says not to use if not in agreement. Legally, and to me ethically, that is clear that if I don't like it I just don't use it.
Yes, to my knowledge it's the only software that supports dual mining. I suspect that won't last though and it would be a great area of R & D for some devs to tackle. =)
For me, I also use the cryptonight GPU versions of claymore. It does about 8% better than any other option I've found on my hardware, so more tan a 5% increase after any fees. And again, that's going by what I'm actually paid for in accepted shares over time.
All that said, as I stated before, I don't care enough to even attempt to stop others from doing whatever hey want either way. I'm just stating my position on it along with why. If the rights owner cares enough it's up to them to deal with it.