Palm have cautioned one group of webOS hackers regarding opening up the Pre to unofficial tethering, not because they don’t wish their platform to be modified but as it might anger Sprint.  The team behind the Pre Dev Wiki were “politely cautioned” by the manufacturer that discussing ways to enable tethering on the smartphone might prompt Sprint to pressure Palm into shutting down the project.

However, it seems that Palm are content for the team – and others – to continue tinkering with other areas of webOS, perhaps because they recognize that Apple’s iPhone ascendancy was helped in no small part by the fan community’s moves to hack it.  Tethering marks the main overlap between the dev project and Sprint, with the carrier excluding using the Pre as a modem for your laptop under the ToS for its data packages.

“We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond-we don’t know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.”

It seems likely that other groups of people will continue to attempt to enable tethering on the Pre, but its general availability may be forced to wait until an unlocked GSM Pre is released.  If Sprint do launch a tethering plan – which they currently say there’s no intention of doing – it’s likely to be an expensive addition rather than fall under the “unlimited” (in reality 5GB) inclusive data.

[via PreThinking]