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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."'"
Much like the modding community with Videogames, if you produce an excellent product that is highly 'hackable' you will benefit from higher sales based off of free work others have done for you; at the same time though, if you produce an average or bad product that is highly 'hackable' few people will notice it ever existed.
Basically, make your product good first then worry about whether you want people to modify it or not.
"When we first came out no one knew what DVR was.... So we made it hacker friendly."
Basically, they aimed it squarely at the "early adopter" segment so that they would spread the word.
I'm trying my best not to sound like a Microsoft hater, but the summary/article makes it sound like Microsoft embraces the hacking community with open arms. In the article, reference is made to XNA, which is a framework Microsoft released that allows developers to create games for Windows and the Xbox 360. However, in order to develop for the 360, you need to pay to subscribe to their "XNA Creators Club". XNA also comes with a bunch of restrictions pertaining to the distribution of games created with it.
I don't really see this as "hacking" compared to all the independent work that's been done on the original Xbox. There, you see things like Xbox Media Center, which is something I would consider a cool and useful hack, made by a community of like-minded hobbyists.
The Tivo part of the article was a much better example of the power of the hacking community.
I think another important aspect in this... and keeping with the TiVo/Xbox theme. TiVo embrased the hacking community, they made their product hackable, and that gained TiVo a lot of respect from the hackers. So while TiVo makes some money from the fact that you have to buy a subscription to their TV listings the hacking community has pretty much ignored trying to screw over TiVo by circumventing the paying for the service. TiVo is happy, and the hackers are happy and the consumer gets a powerful and customizable product.
On the Xbox, the Xbox Linux people pushed and asked nicely for an official distro so they could customize the box. Microsoft refused and as a result the security holes were all blown way out into the open. MS didn't embrace the hacking community, they resisted it and as a result not only is their product hacked it's also insecure and allows games to be pirated very easily. The hacking community satisfied themselves regardless of MS's blessing, and MS isn't happy because their console has been exploited. I'm sure customers would also be more satisfied with the Xbox if it allowed some of the hacked features to be available legally as well.
The moral of the story: Hackers will get their way regardless, if you resist them you'll only end up disappointed, but if you embrace them you might wind up with a superior product and it's not like you'd be loosing anything because your sh*t would get hacked regardless of your choice.
Collector's Edition
...until Linksys basically discontinued the WRT54G as we knew it, making it hacker-unfriendly, then re-releasing the GL version for $20-30 more than you could get it initially.To their credit, this is actually fairly common in the electronics industry. You start by selling a device (possibly at a loss) with expensive parts, in order to just get your product onto the market. Shortly after you've released the original product, you create a new revision using cheaper components and recapture the profits you lost on the first revision. The fact that Linksys continues to produce the WRT54GL version at all shows that they understand the value of being hacker-friendly.
http://outcampaign.org/
I agree that it's an insult to include Tivo as a hackable platform. Tivo gave rise to the term Tivoization and Tivo is *the* main reason for GPLv3. In comparison, Neuros is a much better example of a hackable platform than Tivo.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
They make it sound like TIVO offers some huge help for hackers. In the beginning I'm pretty sure some arm twisting had to be done to even get them to post the changes they made to source per the GPL requirement. Even if that's not true look at what we have today - S2.5 boxes and S3 boxes. The S2.5 requires a hardware mod to the SMT PROM in order to modify the software signatures so modified kernels can be run. The S3, last I checked Dealdatabase, has yet to be hacked! Why? Because they have seriously locked it down having learned from previous attempts and IMO that sux. I have a DTIVO, which was originally crippled, but is losing favor with my provider. I'd REALLY like an S3 - cost be damned - but it cannot be hacked or at least hasn't yet. The only reason source was ever provided was because they were REQUIRED by the GPL to do so.
I understand that TIVO is being required by the media producers to lobotomize some of the features out of their box. However making it nearly impossible for folks to get in there and put them back is crap. That this article portrays them in any other light is bullshit, TIVO is *not* friendly.
I'd really not ever thought too much about GPL3 until I learned about it's provisions to prevent "TIVOization" of hardware. Now that I understand what it is they're trying to stop I'm all for it. Let the TIVO people of the world burn. If they want to piggyback on other's work then they should not only have to share their mods as source but not be allowed to lock the hardware from other's mods. Don't like it? Then write or buy your own OS and absorb the development costs...
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