The Power of the Hacking Community

narramissic writes "In the world of business software, vendors routinely offer tools to help developers customize applications. Not so in the consumer space, where TiVo and Xbox are notable exceptions. This article offers and interesting look at what companies have to gain — and lose — by embracing the hacker community. From the article: 'One example is TiVo Inc., founded in 1997 to develop digital video technology that allows users to record TV shows. TiVo, based on Linux, is an extensible platform, and from its early days the company welcomed hackers and professional developers. "When we first came out no one knew what DVR was," said Richard Bullwinkle, vice president of products at entertainment networking company Mediabolic Inc., and formerly a senior member of TiVo's product marketing team. "So we made it hacker friendly."'"

Comments

Re:Hmm...an interesting thought.

[MBCook]

They exist. They are not nearly as advanced as even the PS1 in most respects, but they exist.

The X Games Station was the first that I know of. Not terrifically powerful, but there, and designed by Andre LaMothe.

Then there is the recently released HYDRA (which I can't find the official link for) which is based on the Parallax Propeller chip which is like the Cell in that it has 8 SPEs so it's very multiprocessor but you can do all sorts of interesting things. Obviously, it's no where near as powerful though. This was also designed by Andre LaMothe.

WRT54G

[Metasquares]

The Linksys WRT54G is an excellent example of what could be gained by making your products "hacker-friendly" (for the original, "good" meaning of hacker).

Misleading Summary

[mpapet]

In case you didn't know Tivo is at least one of the parties to blame for starting a GPL V3 by creating a novel way to simultaneously privatize a Linux-based OS and keep it out of the hands of hackers. It's called tivoization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization and it's a novel form of theft.

The summary is propaganda at best.