(via Engadget Mobile)

This sucks… to say the least. I really, truly hope Microsoft re-thinks this decision (which they won’t), for a number of reasons. The xda-developers community does excellent work and in many cases has provided a vast improvement to functionality compared to stock MS/Operator roms. Ultimately as stated by Peter Poelman below, this is Microsoft’s decision, but I think it is a very poor one that may eventually hurt the bottom line for Windows Mobile products, as many of these "developers" move thier attentions to other Operating Systems and the fans of Do-it-yourself improvements follow them.

Piss poor decision. It’s high time Microsoft sits back and takes stock of reality. We buy your products because we WANT TO not because we HAVE TO. You are not different from any other company, and there are always alternatives…

Read the full announcement HERE.

Ofcourse one can disagree over the severity of the problems caused by the availability of the images versus the impact to our community of simply removing everything. But at this point, we have no other option then to take down any and all ROM images that contain a Microsoft OS, although we still feel strongly this is a disservice not just to our own users but also to the larger community of mobile device developers and enthousiasts. But at the end of the day this is Microsoft’s software and legally speaking, they are within their right to ask us to remove it. And even if there were legal ways to challenge this, we certainly do not feel like a protracted legal fight with Microsoft. They can probably afford more lawyers than we can.
Over the course of the next week, and with much pain in our hearts, we will be going over all the directories on the ftp server as well as all attachments to public messages to remove all the ROM images. We may or may not end up writing automated tools to remove the images.
A great resource dies this coming week. The vendor giveth, and the vendor taketh away.
Sad,
Peter Poelman

Link to Xda-Developers to pull all ROM images next week – Engadget Mobile