ChevronWP7: Community Enabler or Jailbreaking Tool?

There has been a lot of debate regarding the recently released ChevronWP7 tool by Rafael Rivera, Chris Walshand Long Zheng. The debate focuses around the intent of this tool – some say that it amounts to a tool that can be used to jailbreak a windows phone 7, others (including the authors) insist this is just enabling functionality that is already available with any windows phone 7 device.

Personally I am somewhere in the middle – I don’t see this as a jailbreaking tool since it doesn’t permit any access to the inner workings of the device, it just allows applications to be sideloaded. On the flip side, I don’t agree with the argument that they are just enabling functionality that ships with the device – if that was the case then Microsoft would publish a similar tool and not require the registration with marketplace. Sorry boys, Microsoft sets the rules, if you don’t like them then I’d suggest running a muck with Android or Windows Mobile….

With that said, I do like one of the intents behind the tool, which is to simply discover more about the inner workings of Windows Phone 7. But again, if this was truly one of the objectives, then why did they decide to obfuscate the code…..