The "other guy they worship" is helmi himself, who is the one who made all of this possible. Without him you (nor me nor kirvin nor anyone else) would even have AKU3 kitchens not to mention WM6.

Helmi finds it offensive for people to take his work and re-release it as their own. Believe me when I tell you that no one here, not you nor I nor kirvin nor anyone else in the Apache community has the low-level knowledge to do what Helmi does to create these (if you think you do, then I invite you to try). If you've used an AKU3 or (soon to be) WM6 ROM then you owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to helmi for spending so much of his time and energy doing the work no one else has been able to do. Did you know he doesn't even have a functioning Apache? Up until now he has gotten nothing out of it.

And he only started taking donations because I urged him to do so. With that money he can buy the mogul or the next device everyone will be clamoring around for custom ROMs for. Believe me, with the amount of work he puts in, any donations he receives will be a mere pittance. He's also a hell of a nice guy and I hope karma takes good care of him because he deserves it.

The situation with kirvin got ugly because I asked him not to release a kitchen and after agreeing not to he did so anyway without any notice or asking permission of anyone. Instead of working with our community he decided to go around it. We didn't remove the kitchen at all nor did we insist that he do so. He removed it himself and rather than make it into a patch (which would have been perfectly acceptable) he decided to just abandon the whole thing--which was his choice.

You guys can do whatever you want but keep in mind that if you drive helmi away there's not likely to be anyone else to take his place. Want to keep seeing new operating systems on your Apache (or very likely your next CDMA PDA)? Then take care not to bite the hand that feeds you. Helmi's request is not at all unreasonable.

I hope that helps explain this.