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Sony Agrees To Pay Millions To Gamers To Settle PS3 Linux Debacle (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After six years of litigation, Sony is now agreeing to pay the price for its 2010 firmware update that removed support for the Linux operating system in the PlayStation 3. Sony and lawyers representing as many as 10 million console owners reached the deal on Friday. Under the terms of the accord, (PDF) which has not been approved by a California federal judge yet, gamers are eligible to receive $55 if they used Linux on the console. The proposed settlement, which will be vetted by a judge next month, also provides $9 to each console owner that bought a PS3 based on Sony's claims about "Other OS" functionality. Under the plan, gamers eligible for a cash payment are "all persons in the United States who purchased a Fat PS3 model in the United States between November 1, 2006, and April 1, 2010." The accord did not say how much it would cost Sony, but the entertainment company is expected to pay out millions. On March 28, 2010, Sony announced that the update would "disable the 'Install Other OS' feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models." This feature, Sony claimed, would be removed "due to security concerns." Sony did not detail those "concerns," but the litigation alleged piracy was behind the decision. A gamer can get the $55, but they "must attest under oath to their purchase of the product and installation of Linux, provide proof of their purchase or serial number and PlayStation Network Sign-in ID, and submit some proof of their use of the Other OS functionality." To get the $9, PS3 owners must submit a claim, at the time they bought their console, they "knew about the Other OS, relied upon the Other OS functionality, and intended to use the Other OS functionality." Alternatively, a gamer "must attest that he or she lost value and/or desired functionality or was otherwise injured as a consequence of Firmware Update 3.21 issued on April 1, 2010," to get $9.
So, basically, the lawyers get a fee of millions, but they have made it so hard to actually register for the fifty-five dollar rebate that pretty much all the users will get: zero.
Horray for America.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
$55 is a pathetic recompense for losing the ability to rip one's own SACDs.
Installing YDL 6.1 on my PS3 was my first Linux experience. I ran it over composite RCA to my TV so it wasn't much to look at, but it was step one in me becoming a computer guy.
I latter put YDL 6.2 on it and that had a much easier install, as I recall.
I went without upgrading to the OtherOS firmware for a year or so, but eventually some game I wanted to play required a newer firmware so I bit the bullet and installed it. I manually removed the Linux partition before the upgrade so I can't confirm whether the tales of the system not reclaiming the Linux partition if upgraded with it still in place were true.
Still have my PS3, only replaced the original 60GB HDD a few months ago. Didn't realize at the time I bought it in January 2007 I would be getting the most capable version of the hardware... early adoption went well for once. Only real downside compared to the newer models is how loud the cooling fans are.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I'll bet Sony wish they had stuck with Linux. What with M$'s major missteps on Windows huge invasion of privacy, a Sony playstation computer with Linux running for all you other needs, Libre Office et al, would have quite a good marketing advantage but of course the morons got stuck on the idea of how to charge console licence fees for free open source software, so went full blown greed driven stupidity and killed the idea. They could have actually sold playstations for a profit and eased up on licence fees, to gain a major marketing advantage over Xbone (discount games). The civil suit is kind of salt in the wound over the chance they lost.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Get all PS3 owners to Object to the settlement and demand the remedy of Specific Performance. Sony will be ordered by the court to restore 100% of the OtherOS functionality present before the update, which we paid for.
Let me show you the Rasperry Pi. It's a massively underpowered computer, and loads of people run linux on it.
Look shit head, the Air Force built a supercomputer cluster out of 1700 PS3s. The Cell is hot shit if you know what you're doing (which excludes you, of course).
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How would you go about proving that you installed linux on a console 6 years ago?
what will the us air force get for there settlement?
My guess: less than 20000. Realistically, this was never more than small fraction of an already small fraction of users.
Sony sold about 30 million PS3s in North America. Subtract Canada, and the PS3 slim and super-slim models and you're probably down below 20 million. How many PS3 owners really put Linux on their PS3? 1 in 500?
Considering all of the money that Sony's paid out to lawyers over the years fighting this plus the amount they'll end up paying out to the customers if they're going to end up worse off than they would have if they'd settled before this even came to trial. Maybe, if the total costs of the case are high enough, Sony's stockholders may decide to vote out the current management on the grounds of their failing to protect the company's assets. One can only hope.
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Pretty sure this mid-sized fiasco wasn't mentioned at the Sony shareholders meeting on the 17th. Unfortunately, my Japanese isn't that good, so I could have missed it, and I've already discarded the documents.
Only memorable thing at this year's meeting was the late start. Some old fellow charged the stage and got in a shouting match with the CEO for several minutes before they could persuade him to leave. Not sure, but he might have been the same crackpot who was blocked about 5 rows back two or three years ago. I was seated on that side, but around the 12th row that year. In between, there were two minor ruckuses (ruckii?) at the meeting last year, but this year the overall tone of the shareholders seemed to be much more placid, if not downright bucolic.
Actually, one more thing comes to mind. Seemed rather more intensely Japanese this year than in some past years. Still no gift for attending, but they did bring back the exhibition of new products.
(I attended the NEC shareholders' meeting yesterday, and that one was seriously forgettable. Used to be that all of them were on the same day...)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
June 21st was the day Amazon calculated how much of an eBook credit you get for Kindle books, paid for by Apple as part of the settlement...
The fact that Apple has to specifically provide credit for Kindle books brings the tragic nature of that trial to a whole other level. Apple was basically trying to prevent a Kindle monopoly, now required by government to re-enforce it...
My sadness over the result doesn't mean I won't use the credit though! Free books!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why does it matter? The PS3 ended up with less-functionality than what it had when it was purchased. Considering how connected our devices are getting and how dependent they are on software updates, you really should be taking a stand against this sort of behavior.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
which is nothing. We've recently had even this taken away from us. Corps can now force us into arbitration. Want it to stop? Start voting for economically left wing candidates. Corps will always use gov't to their advantage. They're run by the ruling class, and the ruling class has _always_ made good use of the gov't. Either you band together with your fellow 99% and get a piece of that action or you get bowled over.
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Well, the cell was hot shit. Now it is just old shit.
No one serious about computing would do anything on a cell processor. Too hard to program, small memory. And you get what in performance? 200Gflop/s? Any modern beefy laptop crush that before breakfast. Why bother with an archaic outdated fringe architecture?
If you are a computing historian, then it is a different story. But the cell was a dumb idea...
If you read the Slashdot comments at the time, it was probably over 9000 users.
Everyone running Kodi and console emulators are running Linux on it, even if they don't know it.
It was still strong enough to defeat two androids.
The cell really ISN'T hot shit, however it was really good value for money as Sony were basically subsidising the cost, incidents like the Air Force buy a heap to make a computer is part of the reason they had to remove the feature as they were paying part of the cost, their supposed intention was to give a gamer an alternative reason to buy it, not to fund people that wanted cheap hardware. (PS: not defending the DICK move by sony of removing the feature though).
It never affected them until one of the PS3s in the cluster broke and there were no remaining PS3s capable of running Linux. So yes, I'd say it affected them a lot.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Over 9000? I'd like to say that's impossible, but I actually find it quite probable.
Actually, the reason they left out PS2 emulation was because of how error-ridden it was. There's a compatibility list of all PS2 games somewhere, and the compatibility varies wildly between the first five PS3 models. The ones with the actual PS2 hardware in them support some games but not others, and the ones with the software emulation support games the hardware-based ones didn't but then don't support some of the games the hardware-based ones did. What "non-compatible" means can also vary wildly: I specifically remember that Persona 3 (the base game before the FES expansion) had an issue where it would randomly wipe/corrupt save files at a point thirty or more hours into the game on some systems and not on others, while the FES expansion had the same issue but with different versions.
The other problem was that Sony had no way of patching most of these bugs since in a lot of cases they resulted from ugly hacks in the code that were used to make the game run properly on the PS2 hardware and short of re-coding large portions of each non-compatible game there was no real fix for it.
If I were in the US, or could be bothered, I would be lining up for my $9 as I intended to "One Day" get linux installed on mine.
. .
I love this.
When an individual is sued by a multi-million dollar conglomerate of sorts (Music / Movie / Software industries), they demand hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When it's the other way around: "Here's $55... we're all good?"
How many people still have the requisite model of PS3 that works? Between YLOD and selling to upgrade to a PS4, there would be a small subset of the original purchasers that could claim.
Mine still works and I never used the "Other OS" feature since I could get a much more functional Linux running on my laptop.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
"Actually, the reason they left out PS2 emulation was because of how error-ridden it was."
Wrong, the first PS3s were literally stuffed with a micro PS2 inside them. It was full hardware and I had zero issues with Persona 3 (I didnt even get FES until I had stepped on my old P3 disc.)
It was eating into their still-steady PS2 slim sales.
Buggy shit didn't happen until they went to half-hardware half-software emulation.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
When OtherOS support was removed, a lot of people who were using it for Linux suddenly had an incentive to break open the copy protection in order to run their own code.
I suspect if Sony had not removed OtherOS then the number of people interested in cracking the copy protection would have been limited only to those looking to pirate games and it would have taken a lot longer before piracy became an issue.
But seriously, how does no one see that there is a vendetta against Sony on this site and in much of the west in general?
They're a good company that has made quality innovative products and they are being teared apart for no reaosn.
Look shit head, the Air Force built a supercomputer cluster out of 1700 PS3s. The Cell is hot shit if you know what you're doing (which excludes you, of course).
The Air Force, if they weren't complete idiots, disabled updates. Any big cluster system does zero upgrades because they just break the codes that run on them. Unless the Air Force is operated by morons, this never affected them.
Until one or more machines blinks out. Then i'ts a 1699 cluster, or 1698 etc. Unless they can find and old one on craigslist that hasn't been updated they're shit out of luck when it comes to replacements
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It was still strong enough to defeat two androids.
That's when it became perfect.
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I ran Windows 95 on an earlier model using qemu?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
When cell came out, I was enthralled by using it for certain GPU-like computations where it would have been pretty much ideal for my purposes. But the more I looked into the security architecture, the more my gut twisted in dismay, so I never ended up buying one.
When corporations retain these broad powers (most appliances, almost all cloud services) it's almost invariably exercised to make you less happy at some point down the road.
If I could go back in time to offer my younger self some sage advice, it would include this:
Enjoy a game or two when the stars align, but never make a hardware/software decision based on any consideration of game support whatsoever. It's a toxic leash in every direction. Nine of out ten media/entertainment companies are rotten to the core. There is no happy medium. Do not make multi-boot bargains with devil or other "clever" concessions.
Circa 1996 I bought myself an awesome new Pentium Pro system, stuffed with RAM, and a disk drive almost bigger than the OS. Wow! By the standards of the time, it felt like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. The P6 got a bad rap because Win 95 was a POS, but the truth is that the P6 was the first workstation-class CPU Intel made, and it really kicked ass in NT4 or Linux.
However, Linux device support was spotty, getting a graphical desktop set up could degenerate into a multi-day task, and it was far from obvious when or if Linux would achieve world domination.
Plus NT4 could play Quake out of the box. Case closed. Stupid, stupid, stupid younger self! So now I've placed myself in the losing camp, and it took me five years to fully extract myself.
That gut twist I felt over the Cell security model that spared me from participating in this particular Sony shit-show? Paid for in full.
Do mod chips cost more than $55? Maybe $9 for soldering.
Hey, you weren't using FAT32 support in Windows were you? It's a useless feature, right? We'll just patch that out so your USB sticks no longer work, and you can't just open devices that people use.
Sure, only the occasional granddad and IT department will be affected, but you can just buy another OS that does FAT32, right?
The answer: BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT AND PAID FOR IT. And then it was removed. That's a breach of the sales contract. And if you didn't punish it, quite literally companies would take every advantage they could and disable every device you have every couple of years "because you can just buy the new OS, right?".
How many people still have the requisite model of PS3 that works?
/me looks up at CECHE model PS3 that is still working....upgraded the hard drive.
Between YLOD and selling to upgrade to a PS4,
[joke] Selling? What is this selling you speak of? Is that like the "trading in" of games that some Madden-ites and brown-shooter-dudebros speak of? REAL gamers don't "trade in" Why if it wasn't for a flood, I'd still have a working Colecovision/Commodore 128/Atari 2600 with the faux wood paneling! Now get off my lawn![/joke]
Buggy shit didn't happen until they went to half-hardware half-software emulation.
IIRC there were a few (very few) games that had trouble even on the first PS3's because the PS3 tries to implement a "perfect TRC exact PS2" so that games that break the TRC's and use various tricks, have issues. Which are worse on the models without the EE like the CECHE I have.
There are also PSone games that have issues when run on anything other than an actual PSone, that includes the fully hardware compatible PS2! One example is the X-files graphical adventure game, the graphics glitch out and it is unplayable on a PS2 or PS3.
There are games that DO run better on a PS2 or PS3. One example is the PSone port of Diablo. Original reviews state how it can be a bit choppy on a PSone...and it is. However if you play it on a PS3 it is no longer choppy.
IBM was going to provide cell processor blades for data centers.
They DID!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm sure it had more to do with taxes than anything else. The European version of the PS2 came with a BASIC disk which was something completely different from the PS2 Linux kit.
This allowed them to sell it as a general purpose computer which had a lower import tax than a game console.
I'm sure it had more to do with taxes than anything else.
No. Why will that falsehood never die?
The European version of the PS2 came with a BASIC disk which was something completely different from the PS2 Linux kit.
That is correct, YaBASIC.
[quote]This allowed them to sell it as a general purpose computer which had a lower import tax than a game console.[/quote]
That is also correct, but said tarriff was repealed shortly after the release of YaBASIC....BEFORE release of Linux for the PS2. Which was LONG before the PS3 ever existed. So Linux on the PS2/PS3 was NEVER a tax dodge, but totally about encouraging development for the EE/GS and Cell/RSX.
Only those games that require a minimum firmware include an update on disc.
Is the minimum system software version for each PlayStation 3 game conspicuously labeled on its box?
acquire a second PS3
One can't "acquire a second PS3" for $55.
It will also require confirmation not once...but TWICE before it will perform the update removing OtherOS functionality.
As I understand it, it doesn't ask the console's owner twice. It asks the person sitting in front of the console twice. There's a difference. I remember reading sob stories in Slashdot comments of lost data due to someone else in the household accepting confirmation twice, unaware of the effect that it would have on other users of the same console. Or are multi-person households the edge case?