comex To Wait Until 4.3 For Untether?

A somewhat enigmatic
email from @comex
is raising speculation that the next untethered jailbreak may be held back for iOS 4.3. An Italian blogger contacted the guy behind Spirit and JailbreakMe to ask for a short and sweet answer to the question of whether the untether will be available for 4.2.1 or 4.3, and received the response that it "depends when 4.3 is out."

The Dev-Team released the "backup plan" tethered jailbreak after it was clear that @comex was not going to be able to hit his Christmas target for the userland jailbreak he has been working on. Dubbed "jailbreak monte" (after the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't
card trick
), the current version of redsn0w, as well as the untethered version in beta, conserves exploits by relying on iOS 4.2 beta 3, which is only available to developers. This has led to a proliferation of pirated betas, which @comex says "
is making me nervous
." But with the only alternative being a userland jailbreak that Apple would fix in 4.3, @comex has apparently concluded that it makes more strategic sense to hold back on that for now, and wait for the next firmware release. The email sent to Andrea Cervone of iPhoneItalia supposedly had come from the email address @comex has
publicized on his Twitter feed
, though obviously that's easy to fake in a screenshot.

Right now we're at a bit of an impasse, because there are a lot of people who want/need jailbreaks who don't have the $99 to pay for an iOS Developer license, or are ineligible for one because of their age and country of origin. As long as "monte" is the only jailbreak method out there, it's going to tempt those people to pirate 4.2b3, which as @chpwn notes "
hurts the image of jailbreaking
" by giving detractors an excuse to paint it as "illegal and illegitimate." Let's hope that the standoff ends quickly.