TL;DR Binary doesn't match source code and personal fury of the author went into the binary
Users have to be able to trust programmers, because they run their code on their computers. Code that could bascially do anything there - things the user wants as well as things the user doesn't want.
Even a software being open source is no guarantee for anything. Many people aren't capable of reviewing code, all others might think "someone else will have reviewed the code" so in the end noone reviewed it.
Also only a very small percentage of people will actually use the code to compile the binaries themselves. People will instead use the provided binaries - relying on the fact that the source code published is indeed the code that was used to produce the binaries provided along with it.
That said, I came here to warn you about the fact that from version 1.4.4 the BTPro client is abused for expression of some personal feelings of its author. What he has done is change the behaviour of the client if certain users are detected to be using the client, namely "Kwissy", "Naz" and "Choclate-Starfish".
This has been done secretly. Neither the changelog points out this change nor does the source code file (the "diff" file) provided along with the binary contain such user specific code. It is only in the binary itself. That means the binary does not match the source code provided and nobody knows what is in there in reality.
The best way to verify is when you have already downloaded the client. In this case check your openttd.exe simply by opening and searching it with a text editor. You should be able to see it like in this
screenshot
.
In case you don't have the client yet or the files available from BTPro are altered at a later point I have saved the files as evidence, I have stored them here:
BTPro_Client_1.4.4_A_32Bit.zip
BTPro_Client_1.4.4_A_64Bit.zip
This is a major breach of programming ethics and a betrayal of trust. Furthermore it violates the licence of OpenTTD, as you have to publish the source code matching the binaries along with them - not some different source code!
You should know that these people are not banned on BTPro or anything. This is a completely personal thing of ST2 with them, which means that he abuses his "client provider" position he was entrusted with by BTPro for some personal vendetta.
For you as a user it means that if you enrage ST2 you could end up getting a client version that does whatever things with your computer, you cannot know. But even if you didn't enrage him, you should think twice whether this is a person who should be able to ever bring code onto your computer again. If you really still want to stick to the BTPro client better make sure you don't take any of the 3 above mentioned nicks with the current version.
This is a matter of BTPro and should stay here. However, should this post here get deleted I will repost this on the n-ice forums as well as on the n-ice.org main website as a news. Users need to know about this...