Slashdot Mirror
DS Flash Carts Deemed Legal By French Court
Hatta writes with a snippet from MaxConsole: "Nintendo has today lost a major court case against the Divineo group in the main court of Paris. Nintendo originally took the group to court over DS flash carts, however the judge today has ruled against Nintendo and suggested that they are purposely locking out developers from their consoles and things should be more like Windows where ANYONE can develop any application if they wish to."
Yep. MS doesn't really lock down Windows at least from most people's way of thinking. The only ways it is "locked down" are:
1) The source isn't available to anyone who wants it. Contrary to Slashdot beliefs, it isn't a huge secret. There are organizations like governments, universities, and such that have copies of it. However any person who wants it can't get access to it.
2) They want you to pay for every copy. You are not legally allowed to distribute it to anyone you wish, each copy of it needs to be paid for.
That is really it. Development is unrestricted. They have documentation available on how to do whatever you'd like. They also don't bind it to any given hardware or function. While there are some limits imposed by the basic design (like you need to run on an x86, x64 or IA64 processor) they have the resources for you to develop drivers for the platform of your choice.
They really don't limit you much at all, at least not from a normal user's perspective. No, they don't give you the source but if you aren't a programmer, and most people aren't then it doesn't matter at all.
Also, as a practical matter, I find many people who whine about open source really just want to not pay for software, but won't admit that is their main motivation easily.