The problem is that this custom firmware is primarily a one man effort, working independently from the manufacturer, improving the original code. He (unisoft) has stated that the code he has contains some encryption code that the manufacturer would not want to see made public. You will get what that means. And it explains why there is no Git.
So long as it's clean room reverse engineering, then UniSoft is generally legally free to publish the information wherever they want. Redistributing modified firmware files is potentially a copyright violation though. But it's really quite easy to make it a BYOF (bring your own firmware!) style program, that simply imparts changes onto a firmware file you give it. Even auto-downloading it from their source is likely fine.
I would love to contribute this sort of stuff to the project, but with everything being in UniSoft's own hands and just distributing the raw firmwares himself, there's no real way to help. And in fact doing it this way is the most illegal way you could go about it. If they were to just submit the Australian equivalent of a DMCA (which is *very* similar to the US DMCA system) it would be legally required to be removed from this forum, at the risk of liability falling on the forum and/or its hosts.
If the changes and methodology were public there would be the possibility for anyone to add new features and create a pull request, or create their own fork if UniSoft did not want those changes going into the main repo.
This manual some of the forum members are working on, is an attempt to group descriptions of the various improvements all together, to alleviate some of the concerns you have (rightly so). For all means, consider the code closed source, with a small amount of public improvements. I'm not in charge of how the manual is maintained, but it is a collaborative effort with version control, invite only for now (in that respect it is not much different than a private git). It might however indeed be a good idea to publish the latest stable version outside of the forum on a somewhat stable platform.
What is the point of private control and then every now and then publishing it publicly? That defeats a lot of the point of both. Why not just have a single repo hosted on e.g. Github where all changes are published? And of course just make changes on a new branch until you're happy with them, then push back to master?
Well said, bateau020.
Ah git, promises collaborative peer-to-peer interaction. However, in its biggest application, it delivers tyranny and torture to those in the middle and bottom of the pile. [Says one at that bottom.]
Could you expand on what you even mean by this? If you create a git for it you will be the project maintainer. It will be up to you (and anyone else you add as a maintainer) what pull requests are allowed or not allowed.
https://doug-gilbert.github.io/rd60xx-unisoft/rd60xx-unisoft.html
I can't see any advantages to what I have done, over the main document being compiled by Scott with Google Docs. For the job of documentation, from the little I have seen of Google Docs, it seems preferable to my github approach.
That's not a git of the project. It's just the project stuck into another git of yours. The advantage of using a git for it are:
It's easy for anyone to contribute, whether that be fixing simple spelling mistakes, adding more/new better pictures, adding new sections, etc.
Forking the project - others can fork the project and continue it with a modified fork. This is great if for whatever reason your git becomes inactive.
Anyone can easily look at past versions. This is great if someone is on an older version of the firmware for whatever reason, and needs to find some information about that. They can simply go to that one and see the entire project at that specific date.
And as for hosting it on something like GitHub or Gitlab itself, that has advantages as well:
Issues section and rendering of things like md markup. A tremendous amount of projects host their documentation directly in the projects git using markup, while I'm not suggesting this project move to that method it would be something to consider.
It will last much longer. Forums are just not a very good or reliable medium to store things long-term, especially when linking to different external sites. Posts often get lost over time, and when forums move or change they easily lose content. So many things from the 2000s have been lost because of this. It's easy to find on Github though and should easily show up even in search engines, it's much more accessible and longer lasting. And with places like datahoarder on reddit, github projects are often backed up in plenty of independent locations in their original git form.
Organization. It's very hard to piece things together when spread out across multiple forum pages, or even worse threads. This type of thread somewhat solves it, but still doesn't actually fix the main issue.
There are a ton of good reasons to use git. It's why it's the industry standard in so many industries, of course in software development, open hardware development, documentation, and is getting used more and more for things like writing projects, papers, aggregation of other things, etc. The only reason these types of things used to be strewn across all sorts of forums is because the technology just wasn't there or widespread enough yet, it was always just what people had available at the time. That's why nearly everythings has moved away from this model, with very very few notable exceptions (e.g. XDA-Developers).
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