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Sony Encourages Linux On Their Phones
neokushan writes "Sony has been in the news a lot lately — from the PSN downtime and the identity theft issue that came with it, to the numerous court cases launched to try and quell the PS3 hacking scene. It may come as a surprise to many, then, that Sony's mobile smartphone division has taken an almost polar-opposite approach — they're actively encouraging developers to create, modify and install customized Linux kernels into their latest lineup of phones, including the Xperia Play, the device that was once known as the 'PlayStation Phone.'"
Will they remove this feature in a few months after the phones are selling well and then call the people who still want custom software criminals and hackers? I wouldn't get my hopes up. History often repeats.
It was called OtherOS. Never again...
It is absolutely commonplace to find that in companies the size of Sony, different divisions are effectively operated as wholly separate companies and about the only thing they share is the company name and logo.
Separate directors, separate budgets, in some cases even separate legal entities. It shouldn't be too surprising to find they have different attitudes to things like this.
I do not think sony will pull another stunt with the phones. They made enough trouble for their users already.
But I am not gonna buy stuff from them, they showed no respect, I show no interest.
Or I should say "they show no respect" because blaming anonymous for a stolen data case without no solid proof sounds like a tactic to deflect attention from the lousy way they lost data or push the equation hacking=bad, which has many more counterexamples than the equation corporation=bunch of psychos.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
First the music section installs rootkits on the computers of paying customers, then the gaming division removes OtherOS and starts a witch-hunt on GeoHot and others who want to tinker with the products they bought legally.
Sorry, but I don't have any desire to wait until the phone division finds a way to take an even bigger dump on the heads of their customer base.
Sony Ericsson is owned by both Sony and Ericsson but operates as an independent entity, much like Sony-BMG was. Would it be better if it was named Ericsson-Sony instead?
No, it would be better if upper management at Sony and other corporations start appreciating that once you become known for taking anti-customer actions, you're going to tarnish your name to the point that you very well may affect public perception of unrelated divisions and subsidiaries. It's exactly like the marketing concept of "branding", something the suits already understand very well. They just seem to think it only applies when they want it to.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Most vendors publish (some) of the necessary drivers. However in truly incompetent fashion, they do so by dropping the kernel sources they used for the device. No history, no upstream contribution, just a tarball.
This attitude is heavily encouraged by Google forking permanently from the mainline and not maintaining an upstream of its own, resulting in tons of dead-end drivers for these devices that have to be reworked between Android versions. On top of that, you have the problem that userspace drivers for most video chips are built against Bionic, rendering them unusable on non-Android platforms. This leaves you stuck with software-only for video and no 3D at all.
Sadly there's no guarantee that MeeGo will free us from that, but at least using glibc/Xorg (and eventually Wayland) means that ports of other OSes with full hardware support (including 3D) is more likely, as opposed to now where it's either second-rate via chroot+vnc or software rendering only.
Just go over to the xda-devellopers website and see how great Sony's Android phones are. They are crap. The first gen was released on Android 1.6 when 2.1 was already out (or at least 2.0), and Sony never offered an update. The phone hardware is substandard. Sony support of their phones is junk.
Wait about two years, look back to now and see if they were telling to truth. If you want a preview, go back two years and look at what Sony was saying then, and then look at now. Get the idea? Yea.