Thanks for the release.
However, I don't think it's the right thing to do to make solo miners mine by default to an address owned by you, unless they pay attention to the documentation and add the --btc-address option.
Some people like me mine solo even if they have a low hashing power. They do so because pool mining wouldn't provide a significant income, and they rather take their chance with the solo mining lottery. You shouldn't assume that somebody doing solo mining has millions worth of equipment so if they don't pay attention to your documentation it's only fair to punish them by ripping them off of their mining.
In any case, simply upgrading a piece of software shouldn't require the user to add an option in order to keep the previous behaviour. And in this case the change in behaviour is quite dramatic: all mining will go to your address instead of the one belonging to the user!
This is a bad default because it is most likely not what a user would want to do by default, and the most sensible default behaviour should be for cgminer to refuse to start and print an error.
The problem here is that obviously there are money involved, and I think this really reflects negatively on your reputation and the reputation of cgminer.
The fact that a piece of software is given away for free doesn't mean that the developer doesn't have to behave professionally and treat his users with respect.
Other high profile open source software like Linux or Apache certainly would never do anything like that.
No you're reading it wrong. It will not mine solo unless you go to the effort of setting up bitcoind AND adding it as a pool and NOT follow the instructions that discretely say to add a btc address. It does NOT change default behaviour one bit for existing miners with existing configurations.
EDIT: Or is your concern existing solo miners? The previous versions of cgminer could not meaningfully mine solo so I didn't think anyone was trying to.
I at least set up mine but I was under the impression that I didn't need an btc address. Maybe that's why I didn't see anything but new block found messages. If the new one has is coded to give to you when we forget to set an address could we have something like a
"thanks for the gold... now get out of the way your blocking my view"
message, so we know we're mostly/accidentally giving our mining power to you. You should add a cgminer donate command like cgwatcher has if you want a cut of my miniscule pie.
On another note just looked back and noticed that a problem I was having with a u2 device being disabled was a known issue and hopefully being worked on ,but did you get any demo units to play with to see what would keep the u2 device coming on with certain hubs(no solid green when not mining). I have an aitech usb3.0 hub and the one u2 device I put on it would not cycle[power] on[no green,solid red] but a rosewill 2.0 hub would. Wierd huh?
Also good time to test a blink on command function as the u2's do have bright enough green lights for me to tape over soon, but just enough to tell me when its not mining on a "happy" hub.