We’ve talked about before how locking the bootloader is a bad strategy for Motorola because it makes the early adopters and influencers look elsewhere for more open products that they can root and install custom ROM’s on. So now they’ve heard a change of heart, and they’ve decided to offer a way for developer to unlock and lock the bootloader as they please.
This is smart of them because at least the strongest influencers and the modding community will consider them once again. The thing about influencers is that they don’t just tell their friends and families. They tell everyone online about it and when someone like Cyanogen decideds to focus only on a certain brand, everyone who is researching for a phone they can customize online, will see that that specific brand is the most supported by the modding community and they will choose that brand.
The influencers have the potential to influence hundreds of thousands of people at least. This is why it’s good that Motorola at least is becoming about as open as the others, but if I were them I would try to do even more about this, like Microsoft is making a Kinect dev kit for hackers.
