I think that it is obvious why Sony doesn't want free code for the PS2 - they don't want their competitors peeking at the internals of their work.
The video game console market is a cutthroat business. It takes millions to design and build a console, to build a manufacturing infrastructure to produce the consoles, to develop the software with which to build applications for your console, and to get a stable of development houses to develop applications for your console. At some point, as a business, you need to recoup your money. If the system were completely open, then a competitor could make a clone for half the price - and Sony would never be able to recoup their investment.
If Sony had some whiz-bang feature which seperated their product from all of the competitors in the marketplace - a feature that created a demand for their product, then the last thing that Sony would want is to have all of their competitors have access to this because they don't want to lose their market advantage.
Have you seen some of the games for the PS1 such as Gran Turismo or Metal Gear: Solid? These games are visually awesome games - all on a little box that has a 33Mhz processor and 2MB of memory. That 2MB is for the OS, code, stack and heap. The ability to produce these games only became possible after Sony opened up what they were doing in two of their chips inside the playstation. If Nintendo and Sega had access to how the internals of the playstation worked, they might gain insight and a competitive edge in the marketplace by knowing what Sony was doing with its chipsets.
If you have moral reservations regarding the PS2 because of the closed nature of the hardware and software ( a lot of the software used by developers directly accesses specific features within the consoles chipset), then you cannot by any console or hand-held game device.
BattleBots is marketed like pro-wrestling - over hyped "competition", loud music, large breasted women and cliched interviews and commentary. You are giving Joe-six-pack three things that he wants : violence, sex and rock-n-roll. If BattleBots had engineers commentating the matches, Joe-six-pack at home would sit in front of the tube, say "duh, I don't get what they are saying", and switch the channel. If you want the show to remain on television, you have to deal with the fact that it must be dumbed down and marketed to the masses. If you marketed to geeks, it wouldn't last on television - why do you think PBS has such a hard time keeping shows on television?
It has been my experience while working in two IT organizations - each of which has contracted outside consultants from high profile organizations - that each consulting company has its own "methodology" that it tries to propogate, and regardless of the problem trying to be solved the consultants will shoe-horn it to make it fit the problems trying to be solved by the IT organization.
One would think that these consultants who are billing at $250+ per hour would study the problem domain of the IT organization and what the IT organization is trying to do, then evaluate the people and tools used by the IT organization, and then determine what should be done. Instead, these consultants and application architects come in the door knowing only one methodology - and this is the one that is being sold by their employer. These conultants are nothing more than defacto salespeople for their employers methodologies - and the solution to whatever problem the IT organization is having is to purchase the method and hire more conultants.
When I hired on at one of these IT companies, the consultants had been on sight for over a year and had billed over $6,000,000 in expenses, but there was no product or even code written ( to be fair, the db schema on the server was complete). The IT company scrapped the consultants and hired some experienced engineers ( which is how I came aboard ), and within four months, we produced for them release 1 of thier product. Within the next three months we released the next two phases of their product. In the end, we received huge bonuses because it was the quickest that the IT organization had ever rolled out a product, it experienced the least amount of problems once it was rolled out to customers.
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I think that it is obvious why Sony doesn't want free code for the PS2 - they don't want their competitors peeking at the internals of their work.
The video game console market is a cutthroat business. It takes millions to design and build a console, to build a manufacturing infrastructure to produce the consoles, to develop the software with which to build applications for your console, and to get a stable of development houses to develop applications for your console. At some point, as a business, you need to recoup your money. If the system were completely open, then a competitor could make a clone for half the price - and Sony would never be able to recoup their investment.
If Sony had some whiz-bang feature which seperated their product from all of the competitors in the marketplace - a feature that created a demand for their product, then the last thing that Sony would want is to have all of their competitors have access to this because they don't want to lose their market advantage.
Have you seen some of the games for the PS1 such as Gran Turismo or Metal Gear: Solid? These games are visually awesome games - all on a little box that has a 33Mhz processor and 2MB of memory. That 2MB is for the OS, code, stack and heap. The ability to produce these games only became possible after Sony opened up what they were doing in two of their chips inside the playstation. If Nintendo and Sega had access to how the internals of the playstation worked, they might gain insight and a competitive edge in the marketplace by knowing what Sony was doing with its chipsets.
If you have moral reservations regarding the PS2 because of the closed nature of the hardware and software ( a lot of the software used by developers directly accesses specific features within the consoles chipset), then you cannot by any console or hand-held game device.
BattleBots is marketed like pro-wrestling - over hyped "competition", loud music, large breasted women and cliched interviews and commentary. You are giving Joe-six-pack three things that he wants : violence, sex and rock-n-roll. If BattleBots had engineers commentating the matches, Joe-six-pack at home would sit in front of the tube, say "duh, I don't get what they are saying", and switch the channel. If you want the show to remain on television, you have to deal with the fact that it must be dumbed down and marketed to the masses. If you marketed to geeks, it wouldn't last on television - why do you think PBS has such a hard time keeping shows on television?
It has been my experience while working in two IT organizations - each of which has contracted outside consultants from high profile organizations - that each consulting company has its own "methodology" that it tries to propogate, and regardless of the problem trying to be solved the consultants will shoe-horn it to make it fit the problems trying to be solved by the IT organization.
One would think that these consultants who are billing at $250+ per hour would study the problem domain of the IT organization and what the IT organization is trying to do, then evaluate the people and tools used by the IT organization, and then determine what should be done. Instead, these consultants and application architects come in the door knowing only one methodology - and this is the one that is being sold by their employer. These conultants are nothing more than defacto salespeople for their employers methodologies - and the solution to whatever problem the IT organization is having is to purchase the method and hire more conultants.
When I hired on at one of these IT companies, the consultants had been on sight for over a year and had billed over $6,000,000 in expenses, but there was no product or even code written ( to be fair, the db schema on the server was complete). The IT company scrapped the consultants and hired some experienced engineers ( which is how I came aboard ), and within four months, we produced for them release 1 of thier product. Within the next three months we released the next two phases of their product. In the end, we received huge bonuses because it was the quickest that the IT organization had ever rolled out a product, it experienced the least amount of problems once it was rolled out to customers.