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More on Microsoft vs. Lik Sang
Levendis47 writes "CNET's News.com is running an article on Microsoft's legal manuevers which have successfully shut down the Lik Sang ecomm store where they've been selling various game system mod chips including the OpenXBox Mod Chip. This leads me to two questions (and I'll admit my ignorance, faux or not, in order to get discussion on this topic): 1) When a customer purchases an XBox (or any game system for that matter) are you intrinsically "signing" an end-user agreement in the purchase that makes modding the device illegal? 2) Could a non-profit org setup an effort to have mod chips produced and "distributed" at the cost of production w/o legal repurcussions? (i.e. would not making a profit on XBox's hardware mods protect you from their wrath?) 3) I understand the whole DRM aspect of mod'ing for playing copied games, BUT, what about legit gray-hacks like the Mandrake Linux XBox project and such? It would seem to me that in the long haul, Microsoft would support such efforts because they could sell more devices (and potentially more software if they licensed an opensource validation library)... "
one of the reasons BillG doesnt want modded XBox's is because then people wont buy as many XBox games, just use it as a very cheep linux box. MS losses around$100 on each Box sold, they need to sell like 5 games just to break even (cant remember if this is exactly right, but i know its somwhere in that ballpark) Long story short, they cant afford to sell too many XBox's without games.
The reason they don't want you to be able to run other operating systems on their hardware is that they depend entirely on licensing fees from software sales to make their money. If you buy an XBox, mod it, and run Linux on it, they very likely have lost on the order of $10.
The XBox is probably in trouble as it is.
Microsoft's whole plan with the xbox was to sell the hardware below cost, and then to crank out the software and make the real profit off game sales. If you're buying the hardware and supplying your own software, you are, in effect, costing them money.
Because you can now run Linux on the Xbox, the mod-chip makers actually have a better chance in the legal squabbles.
The mod-chip becomes a "reverse-engineering" product, with verifyable "non-infringing" use.
I.e. since running Linux on an Xbox is perfectly legal, and you need a mod-chip to make it happen, the mod-chip manufacturer gets some legal protection, since it is not only used for "illegal" purposes.
P.S. IANAL, please Fla^H^H^HCorrect me if I'm wrong.