What is the incentive for the open source developers to release such fast miners? Dave says that one guy could beat him and "everyone" would be running his code. Why wouldn't the other guy run his privately, thus effectively splitting the money with other smart folks? You can always release it later to get the fame and ego points for being brilliant.
Style difference? yvg makes money from a built-in 1-2% dev fee on his (binary) miners. They are fast, support many pools and protocols, and are robust enough that you can pretty much start them running in /etc/rc.local and trust that they'll still be running a month later. I don't know what his total crypto income is, but I suspect he's doing OK. In contrast, you'd cringe at the horrible code I cranked out for some of these miners. Quality, high-performance, and delivered fast: pick two. It wouldn't surprise me if his business model was, in the long term, more profitable. He argues that it is. I haven't wanted to lock myself into providing support for software long term, so I picked a very different model.
I believe, though, that there's a mix of both in many situations. I think some of the miner devs release some code openly as an advertisement for their skills and then do some contract work. The shady ones probably have opportunities to collaborate with coin developers to pre-develop a secret GPU miner for a "CPU only" coin so that the devs can instamine it. There's at least one I know of who's customized his code and sold it to a botnet herder.
I love the question someone raised earlier: If someone can get a huge advantage that "kills" the coin, it's a flaw in the coin design. Is there a way to have the coin dynamics incentivize developers to make fast code and release it? That's one to chew on...
