Slashdot Mirror
Sony's War On Makers, Hackers, and Innovators
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine takes a look at Sony's history of suing makers, hackers and innovators. Over the last decade Sony has been targeting legitimate innovation, hobbyists, and competition. From picking on people who want to program their robot dogs to dance to suing people who want to run their own software on something they bought. Sony has made so many mistakes with technology choices (Memory Stick, Magic Gate, UMD!), perhaps they'll end themselves soon enough, but until then MAKE is keeping score for Sony's all-out war on tinkerers."
There's the problem, every Slashdotter knows this but what about everybody else? Your average consumer doesn't know/care about any of this and until they do, this whole issue is going to continue for the rest of us. As long as the majority of Sony's customers just want to play on their PS3 and believe all hackers are puppy killers Sony doesn't need to care about whether its customers are even aware of being abused.
You should stop worrying about what other people should buy. I want to be able to tinker with my stuff, so I won't buy anything Sony. But when somebody else wants to get screwed by Sony, they are within their rights. Either they will get what they want (e.g. a PS3 which just plays their games) which is fine. Or they will run into something they are not allowed to do by Sony and stop buying it as well. It's their life, their money. That's a free market for you.
finally someone with a brain here on slashdot
The sole point of the hacking was to run pirated games. It's as clear as day. If you wanted to "tinker" - you've had the "Other OS feature to tinker with all you like. Sony's console was the only one which allowed to do that. But there weren't enough cool games for the PS3 back then, so the real tinkerers were happy, and pirates didn't care.
Now ps3 had quite a few very nice games that pirates would obviously love to steal. So here come the "hackers" - NOW there's a reason for them to get to work. It has nothing to do with tinkering - if anything, it had made it pretty much impossible to tinker anymore: thanks to the "hackers", the "Other OS" was removed, so the only way to tinker NOW is to indeed hack it, which violates EULA and might land _real_ tinkerers in hot water.
So stop with this bullshit already, pretending that you do it out of some noble cause. You've ruined it for all legitimate users, who now have to endure frequent firmware updates and might in the end have to deal with serial keys with every game or some other crazy DRM scheme, and who have lost the only legitimate way of playing with the Cell processor.