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Game Over For Sony and Open Source?
Glyn Moody writes "Sony has never been much of a friend to hackers, and its infamous rootkit showed what it thought of users. But by omitting the option to install GNU/Linux on its new PS3, it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony. Unless, of course, you find Google's new distribution alliance with Sony to pre-install Chrome on its PCs exciting in some way."
A few years back, a friend of mine needed me to format his Vaio desktop. He lost his restore disk, and he wasn't overly fond of XP anyways because of the speed difference. Everything installed smoothly, but I couldn't get a few key things working (i.e. sound). Why? Because not only did Sony not support Windows 2000, they refused to release any specs whatsoever on it's hardware. The hardware was mostly from major manufacturers, but it came directly from them to Sony, with no specs available whatsoever, thus no third party drivers (ones that worked anyways). This may not sound like that big of a deal in 2009, but at the time, no other major vendor had this problem - which wouldn't even have been a problem at all had they simply "unblocked" Windows 2000 support. After a few days of searching high and low, I just gave up and bought a copy of Windows XP off of eBay.
So basically, the most proprietary hardware vendor out decides against allowing you to run an OS that they never officially supported anyways? Seriously, is this that big of a shock?