Holy cow, a third update in two days?!? Yep!
Today Motorola responded to all of the eFuse nonsense with something that makes the situation a bit better.
Motorola’s primary focus is the security of our end users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements. The Droid X and a majority of Android consumer devices on the market today have a secured bootloader. In reference specifically to eFuse, the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software. If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. Checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats. Motorola has been a long time advocate of open platforms and provides a number of resources to developers to foster the ecosystem including tools and access to devices via MOTODEV at http://developer.motorola.com.
This is very good compared to bricking the phone. At least the phone can be recovered by the user instead of having to ship it to Motorola for a repair(not sure of the complete details and how warranty would work). I’m also happy to see that Moto responded so quickly to the public. However, this still does not sit well with me as Android was developed with developers and tinkering in mind. If I want to mess around with my device, why can’t I?
(Thanks to Tom for pointing this out for me)