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Looking Closely at the Restrictions of Linux on the PS2
Hal-kun writes: "I wrote an interesting article about Sony's upcoming Linux distro for the PS2 and some intellectual property concerns I have with it. It's an intresting look at how Sony limits the ability to have full access to the system, yet being able to keep it under GPL."
They can release the whole source for their linux OS. The playstation and playstation 2 have copywrite protection that searches for "bad" areas of the disc, know as the boot sector. Domestic CD-RW drives cannot perfectly duplicate these discs, so you have to "modify" your console to get it to boot these discs. Sony has recently been going after the makers of the devices that allow you to boot CD-R's and DVD-R's. So, most people, even with the PS2 linux source, couldn't use it without buying Sony's disc. They could also make it so big that you can't fit it on a 700MB disc, being a DVD release only, which would further prevent most from getting it for free.
Cthulhu Saves.
...there are a lot of people gonna be *real* surprised at this part. Take for example embedded devices or internet appliances...
(slightly off-topic)
Where you mention "pull price", that is actually the pre-tax price of whatever you are buying. In your case, 3%. The tax is now 5%; but the net info on the labels is the same.
In case anyone is curious, there are actual laws in Japan prohibiting the selling of books, magazines, and other things at a lower-than-retail cost. It falls under "protecting the cultural heritage" or something.
Personally I have had bad experiences with Sony. I have had 4 PS1's and 1 PS2, and a multitude of other Sony products. While typically for the most part the products are good the one thing that gets me about Sony is Warranty and support. Even the most minor thing is a instant void of warranty. I watched them void a friend of mines warranty on his PS2 becuase his fiber audio out cable wasnt made by Sony. I've also seen them do the same thing for the composite cable on the way out, and even power cables on the PS1. Not to mention non Sony memory cards, yes and even games. Which brings me to my point. If using anything non-Sony voids a warranty.... What happens if you add anything at all to the Linux distro they provide you with. Does that void your warranty? Or are they making exceptions in thier policy this time. I'm willing to bet they aren't making any exceptions.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
I hadn't realised until now how that was done, they must be using the same sync on green on/off functionality to restrict our playback.
When this was first discovered at launch a lot of people (myself included) were upset about this, if you want to play games at their best AND watch dvd's you have to keep switching leads. Sony claim they HAD to limit playback in this way (cos of the marcovision thing, I think), but most standalone dvd's over here, including ones manufactured by Sony DO let you play dvd's over an RGB lead.
Thankfully DVD Regionx from Datel enables dvd playback through rgb, as well as allowing discs from any region to be played.
The author with no word states that "Sony is evil". He explains the situation. There is no judgement. Look closely, what you maybe perceive as such is entirely your own.
Linux is free. So what? That does not make it "good" (versus "evil" profit) per se. It is always what you do with it, or with copyright in general, what defines it as good or bad. Law is neutral, how you follow law or use the holes of a law is the point.
The "conclusion" is none that I can follow. What you think about the author is entirely your own business. What the author wrote could be completely wrong, I cannot prove its validity. However, in human society there is always a minimum of trust. So I trust that, what he wrote is correct.
And I hadn't known this beforehand.
Now I was considering buying this kit. However, after this article I'm only considering it, because I can get a keyboard, hard-disk, and ethernet adapter in one set.
Have a nice day!
Sony are trying to resurrect the "bedroom games coder", and if they can get talented people to learn THEIR architecture it could well benefit them. People cutting their teeth on this system will have a much better chance of a job in the industry, which will mean more games and so more licensing money for Sony.
They've done this before with the Net Yarouze (as mentioned in the article), and people did indeed use it to get into the games industry.
I have a japanese ps2-linux kit (although really the only thing that makes it japanese is the machine it's running on) and I am personally very glad I have it.
1. as a developer, this gives us a cheap way to give artists/designers tools that actually show how elements will look on the TV (colors), and how PS2 specific art (graphics/sound/etc) will be rendered. it is a huge savings to be able to use TCP/IP and open-gl for these tools. it also makes working from home a bit simpler, and who can argue with that?
2. as a programmer, I get to program two things that I enjoy (just for the hell of it) - linux and ps2 hardware - at the same time. sure, I have a few PCs here that would kick the linux kits ass easily at generic apps, esp. memory-hungry and cpu-hungry apps. but just for the fun of using linux on an embedded system, it's great.
and for a wannabe console game programmer, shit -it's an awesome place to start. you can begin with the familiar ground (linux/open-gl/etc) and slowly move to the real hardware specific features.
3. as for GPL vs. Sony's IP rights, I think some people around here have this impression that there is some guy at sony "headquarters" in japan making this hugely compicated agenda that is surely not in the best interest of the open software crowd. I'm pretty damn sure this isn't the case, and as a matter of fact, I think there are some people at sony who have gone pretty damn far (maybe even slightly beyond what their lawyers would consider comfortable) to show their support for the open software crowd. some people there do care, but some don't. same as everywhere. and instead of bitching about it, I'm damn happy that they've taking this starting step (opposed to how closed the PS1 was).
there were probably a couple of people at sony who went to bat saying that they should release this linux kit because there'd be a ton of people who'd be very glad to have it. and that stance was probably pretty unpopular. so the message I want to send to those guys it "hey thanks, great job. good start!" so that maybe in the future, they'll go a little bit farther next time and have even fewer things closed.
flame if you want.
whatever.
In no way was this designed to be some sort of feasible Linux system in a general sense. Sony don't particularly want you hacking about making drivers and doing weird things with their hardware. In fact they've made it pretty damn difficult to do so. And as for ideas on hacking it to gain more access... I respecfully suggest that people making these overtures don't have that much of an understanding on what the PS2 hardware is like.
However if someone absorbs much of the included hardware manuals, gets a handle on some of the DMA issues and maybe learns a bit of vector unit assembly then they're some ways down the road in becoming a useful PS2 commercial developer. Is that anyone here? I doubt it.
I'm sure the debate will continue and some hard-core Linux evangelists will crow about license issues and that there ought to be unfettered access to the hardware. That's not Sony's agenda and, to be honest, why is this much of a desirable thing anyway. Quite clearly Linux on a PC is more useful in any event.
I'd really like to know if this will sell anything in the West at all. The demand for games developers is such that you can get an entry level job straight out of university anyway. If you're going to work on PS2 dev, they'll factor in that training on the 'real steel' dev-kits anyhow.
If you wanted to do home-brew game development for console-like applications, the Gameboy Advance is an infinitely more feasible platform from a technical point of view. Coupled with the fact you could give a copy of your work to someone else or demonstrate it on a stock GBA, it's got to be a more attractive platform for this sort of thing.
Unfortunately for IBM and Apple, even though the platforms were immensely successful, it wasn't them who made the real big money - it was distributed among a lot of other players. Sony cares about making money rather than standardizing an open platform.
Some time ago I had a Sony CRX120E CD Recorder which had problems with CD-Text. I called Sony support.
"Yes, it's a known problem. You need a firmware upgrade."
"Oh OK. Where can I download it?"
"You can't download the firmware. You have to send the device to a Sony service center and they will upgrade it for you. It will cost 50 DM."
"Lady, you can <censored> my <censored>."
I was pissed. I frantically searched the web for the firmware. The only thing I could find was the firmware for the CRX140E on the Dell website. The CRX140E is an 8x burner while the CRX120E is a 4x burner. I thought it was highly improbable that this would work, but what did I have to lose, I had to send the burner to Sony anyway.
I hacked the Dell flash program to work with the CRX120E and flashed the firmware. Naturally, it didn't work. The burner was dead. Wouldn't even respond to ATAPI commands. The next day, I sent it to the Sony service center.
A week later, I get an email from the Sony service center.
"We weren't able to flash the firmware. The burner doesn't show up on the IDE bus. We will have to replace the main board, which will cost <some ridiculous amount> DM."
OK, so these bozos can't flash the firmware in-circuit. Great "service center".
So I replied:
"Alright, send it back to me, maybe you could put the firmware on a diskette and put it with the burner, so I can flash it myself, after I've built my own freakin flash programmer?"
Response:
"Our policy is to not give out firmware. But we can dispose of the device for free if you want that. Otherwise we would charge you a <some ridiculous amount> return fee for P&P."
So, this was the last Sony product I've bought. Ever.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
It's probably one of those things that big companies do, where marketing says there's a demand for linux, so they do it, then IP says they need to restrict it, and no-one ever quite twigs that the end product is useless. This reminds me of the 'Yaroze' mini-development kit for the original playstation, it was so hobbled (both in access to features and in terms of who owned the code you make with it) as to be pointless
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I like the idea of porting Linux to my Dreamcast because it gives it new life. For example, I want to be able to burn CD's of DIVX-compressed movies and play them back on my Dreamcast, so I can watch them on my TV w/o need of having a computer attached.
If first they port Linux to the DC (which I think has been done...), then they port DivX to the DC, then those are the building blocks I need to do this. Then, they can port Linux to the PS2, and then this code at some point will be able to run on it. Suddenly my extinct game machine has a new purpose.
If anything, it's a fun project. Practicality comes later.
"Derp de derp."
What others have said, about attracting budding developers, is true, but it's not the real story.
The console industry represents a new revenue model for the "personal computer industry" - and it may mean the demise, or at least marginalization, of the PC in the home. You see, Playstation represents 40% of Sony's entire revenues (yes, Sony as in Sony music, pictures, VCRs, telephones, PDA's, computers, etc...). That's an enormous amount of money. And they sell those consoles at a loss for quite a while, too. How, you ask? Because every time a game get's sold, they get a piece of the action. They've used their hardware platform to become an indispensable middle-man, and it's making them filthy rich.
Microsoft, ever vigilant, realizes that a lot of their revenues come from home users, and only games really drive sales of home computers. Console game sales have been spanking PC game sales for some time - to the point where, in a few years, the PC game industry will find itself in a state of serious decline. If not for email, web browsers and word processors, not many people would buy PC's at all. And by the way, consoles, starting with the Dreamcast, are already doing email and web browsing.
It's simple economics - console? $200-300. PC? $500 and up. And for a good PC, that can play the latest games? $1500+. I'm sure you can understand why consoles have an order of magnitude more penetration than PC's.
Microsoft understands this, and that's why the XBox has a hard drive. The console is going to be able to surf and do email and IM and, eventually, do word-processing (USB/ethernet printers!), TiVO-like functionality, etc. etc. That's convergence, baby. And at that point it's replaced the home computer, and PC's are something you only see at the office or at a hobbyist's house. PC games will stop being ported to the console and start being ported from it, if at all (this part is well under way).
Sony is a threat to Microsoft - Bill earnestly wants to keep owning the "home computing" market. They want all those "home consoles" to be running Windows. They want to be the middleman for every game and application sale in the home. The XBox is a multi-billion dollar loss-leader predicated on this very notion.
Sony is a very smart company. They're savvy, they're well run. They know the score, and they have a big first-mover advantage. It's going to be a bloody fight. We know that Microsoft intends to make the XBox into a $300 home computer, based on Windows, to run "consumer applications" along with consumer games, and be waiting at the finish line when the race is over. In this round, Sony just introduced a prototype for _their_ consumer applications platform.
It's Linux.
We're on the road to Tycho.