I'm not a member of the team. But I just saw the post put up on their main page, which explains some things. It's a good read:
" Sorry if it seems like we’re “not doing anything”, but we set high standards on our work. One thing we will never do again is include blatant warez in our releases, we don’t want another Swype style incident. The engineering release of ESE53 is just that, warez. It was illegally obtained by an employee at Motorola from an engineering testing area, then sold to the highest bidder. Please excuse us for not wanting to taint our reputation by including or using it. If/when we get a sanctioned OTA 2.1 release we will look into it more thoroughly. Till then, we are keeping ourselves out of grey area ethics.
To address the “well you should still be releasing non 2.1 stuff” mentality, let me inform you of some of the things we’ve had to do behind the scenes.
We had to bounce back from a crippling nutshot when the sholes.info server went down, which was no small ordeal. We are indebted to the good folks at
Beyond Hosting for helping us get our primary website up within a matter of hours, and to the people who sunk their time and effort into getting the main page infrastructure for it set up in that time. Try bringing up an entire site in under 24 hours, it’s not fun.
We also had to redo and push DMupdater, which was a task in itself. I still don’t know how that got finished as quick as it did. Camel deserves a big round of applause for his hard work and dedication.
Trevorj then had to do a last minute sanity check and rush release (rushed in time, not in quality) of DM1.0 He spent time he would have rather used for other things making sure the release went out in a working state, with the minimum of delay.
Getting the repositories back online was the next step, and
Aschen Networks graciously provided VPS space at a moments notice. Provisioning the VPS, securing it, and getting git and gitosis setup properly took a day in itself, and recovering the scattered repositories and importing them took the better part of a week.
Meanwhile, the forum was being setup as well, and more work was being done on the repository server, mainly getting gitweb and git-daemon properly installed so that people could browse the source repositories, and we could more easily view changes as they were applied.
About this time we started importing and testing the latest 2.6.29 kernel release from AOSP, in an effort to keep the innovation moving. This consisted of a review by Trevorj and myself of hundreds of commits from AOSP, TI, and the mainline Kernel.org trees. We have been in-house testing new boot images, as well as updating the mkrom tools to work properly with git.
The engineering testing release of ESE53 dropped soon after, causing quite a stir. The general consensus was to wait for the official OTA, since the person who leaked it hinted at a binary watermark being included. Better safe than sorry.
Since then, we’ve put up the wiki at
droiddev.org, which will soon have dev information, instructions for using the tools and repositories, and information pertaining to the rom image format we have pioneered.
SirPsychoS pushed the SP recovery source to the repository server sometime last week(forgive me for forgetting the date), and has been working on fixing the makefiles and dependincies. He has also retooled mkrom to use fakeroot, and made some other enhancements.
Bugzilla was just deployed to handle any user problems relating to our release, and this seems to have caught some flack. Let me state that having bug tracking is a pivotal part of a solid and stable release system. We need feedback on what is broken, and a forum is just not the right tool for that. Our Bugzilla installation automatically informs the proper parties when a bug is entered, keeps the various bugs in an easy to navigate format, and makes sure that everyone is informed along the way. No longer will your valuable user input be hidden under 30 posts about lolcats and earwigs.
We decided that we’d rather get our infrastructure fully operational before we do anything more, because a solid foundation makes for a solid project, a solid community, and a solid release.
To all those who have supported us during this bumpy transition, we thank you. It’s great to know that people can see through the fog and realize that we do this because we enjoy it, because it’s interesting, and because it furthers the community.
To those that scoff and spew vitriol, I hope you can excuse the fact that we value our integrity and our product stability more than fame.
sgx
If i have forgotten anyone or anything important, please let me know."