Sony agrees to pay millions to gamers to settle PS3 Linux debacle
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I seriously doubt very much money will be payed out to users if this settlement is approved.
I'm sure the lawyers would be happy with it though:
> The deal also provides up to $2.25 million in attorneys' fees for the lawyers who brought suit.
That payout is equal to around ~40909 users who are able to prove they used the Other OS functionality. I'm doubtful that many exist.
Heck, most won't even have the PlayStation.
What proof would users even reasonably be able to furnish?
Though, given the poor excuse for remediation, I don't have strong hopes for any such tool.
From a lay person's perspective, this is a ridiculous settlement - if there's a way to detect if it was used, Sony should be required to issue a refund for the full price at the time of sale. Putting aside people looking for an easy paycheck, the few who actually were tinkering with the OtherOS option (and the labs who used it, since there were a few iirc), deserve to have a refund. $55 is hardly just given the offense and the cost to the buyers.
If you think you deserve better, you're free to opt out of this and sue them yourself.
My statement was to say two separate thoughts:
1. The settlement is ridiculous. 2. Instead of the settlement, Sony should be required to issue refunds.
Basically, I'm annoyed by the existence of the settlement itself, and suggesting that the legal team behind the suit is being negligent in favor of a hefty paycheck.
I don't know much about him, so I won't disagree with how you feel about him but I did follow the whole Sony/other OS mess and Sony was wrong. Wrong to get rid of those features and wrong to go after the people that tried to restore them.
I remember at that time I was so excited thinking I'd get to use my PS3 as my main machine, my game console, and for bitcoin mining -- and a bluray player. I desperately wanted it to be my entertainment center for all purposes.
Sony didn't want me to be a happy customer.
At the time I remember there was a team working on hashing functions in hand-tuned assembly for the PS3's Cell processor that would take advantage of it's vector capabilities. I wanted to take their implementations and learn assembly well enough to write my own bitcoin miner. This was long before ASICs became a thing so the PS3 looked like a big money-making opportunity. :-)
You need proof as in legal proof, i.e. a paper saying "I used it".
And $55 seems like a pretty good settlement for someone who used the Other OS functionality. Remember, that's a settlement value--the average loss of value of the PS3 to class members discounted by the probability of success at trial.
I understand the practical problems with providing the required proof, but this seems like a much more reasonable way of structuring a settlement than the potential alternatives.
This seems like a ... sidegrade.
Why? Maybe they didn't care at the time, but maybe they would later, or their kids would, or they would get a better deal when they resold it. Why should Sony get away with robbing their customers of advertised functionality with the excuse that they "didn't use it anyway"?
Maybe someday we'll see it with car manufacturers. "Your passenger door has been disabled. Please provide proof that you carry passengers with you to get a token reimbursement for the trouble."
In fact, what's the point of punitive damages in general if not to punish the defendants in civil suits?
So, I'm glad this finally won. I was disenfranchised by their obnoxious actions. Guiltily, I admit that the $55 I get back will probably go towards a used PS3 so I can play the game alongside my Linux-enabled PS3 :)
I'm done with consoles.
It shows how different the clientele of Nintendo is, since they change the controllers at every new iteration.
I'll stick to my PC, where every controller works.
Your PC still has a 15 pin gameport and a 9/25 pin serial?
That's pretty easy to do when you don't switch CPU architectures every generation, and the new chips are (mostly) a faster version of the old ones. Gamecube, Wii, and Wii U all have a PowerPC CPU in them, with an AMD (ATI) GPU.
Imagine if Apple did something like this and decided to disable Bootcamp on all Macs and make your Windows and Linux installs inaccessible if anyone updated your computer. This is probably the most anti-consumer and anti-developer move I can think of in computing history (although the rootkit Sony CDs were pretty bad too). Sony had a whole developer community working for them for free, making software, supporting their system, and evangelizing for them before they decided to shut them down and even pursue them with legal threats for doing what Sony asked them to do, experiment and create.
Even if they somehow can't fix the PS3, just adding some official support for OtherOS on PS4 which uses conventional hardware would send a huge message that they actually care about their fans and would help to counter Microsoft's move opening the Xbox to Windows apps for expanded utility.
First, the firmware update didn't remove support for a feature, it explicitly blocked certain user space software. It forced consumers to use Sony's PS OS rather than an alternative like Linux.
Second, it helps establish precedence that hardware vendors can have control/part ownership of hardware after you purchase it. Gone are the days where the computer you purchase pre-assembled is your own. Now vendors can apparently control what you decide to do with hardware that you purchase. Sony isn't alone in this, Microsoft has been moving towards this for a long time, and Apple is probably the worst offender, but they are joined by most hardware vendors at this point.
It's anti-consumer behavior. It probably shouldn't even be legal, but yet corporations can get away with it, so they continue to do it since it aligns with their best interests (barriers to competition).
If you wanted to decline the update and keep using Linux, you could. All your existing games would continue working, too, but you couldn't play games released after the update (which require the newer firmware). Nor could you play online, as having all updates is a requirement of connectng to their online service.
I have a 60GB PS3, but I agree with the grandparent that a legal obligation to maintain support indefinitely would set a bad precedent.
Second, it wasn't optional for people, like me, who bought a PS3 after the update. Since I bought a console with the restriction, I don't remember exactly whether people could refuse the update. But your points, about not being able to play future games or playing online are also arbitrary restrictions which, while not outright preventing you from refusing the update, are designed to arbitrarily handicap you to the point that not updating is more of a hindrance than not.
Some choice:
> However, without updating, console owners couldn't connect to the PlayStation Network, play any games online, play any games or Blu-ray movies that required the new firmware, play any files kept on a media server, or download any future updates.
If you buy a product on a claim that it performs N features, and a future update forces you to choose which subset of N features you would like to keep, the company has still failed on their claim.
While I think there's an argument for being required to allow online access to those within warranty, it makes way more sense to just guarantee it plays the games it played when you got it. It's something that consumers could easily understand and depend on.
That's not a given. Some of the features require no ongoing support, like playing media from a local server.
> So, if Sony wanted to shut down their games division tomorrow (...) how long should they be required to keep running their servers?
Leave the concrete numbers to the judges and juries. But if today I bought a $700 console from an authorized dealer, and tomorrow it was a brick, I'm pretty sure I'd have a case for getting a big chunk of that money back. If in a year it was mostly a brick, I'd expect less money back. Exact numbers in these cases come down to negotiation.
All this is tangential of course because Sony didn't stop supporting the platform.
Why should it be illegal to sell a product on whatever terms you want? Sony got sued because they advertised one set of terms but changed them after the fact. That's reasonable. But it's not like Apple purports to do anything other than sell a locked down device. What's wrong with that?
The undermining of private property rights comes to mind.
Apple selling you a locked-down piece of hardware does not undermine your property rights. You get to freely exercise all the rights you purchased. Nothing is forcing you to buy a bundle of sticks that doesn't have the specific sticks you want.
I call bullshit. Up, down, right, left and center. So much bullshit.
The law doesn't make sense most of the time.
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-launches-0-99-mac-...
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/apples-0-99-facetime-cha...
They already do the same that Microsoft does with their APIs for PS3, PS4 and to smaller extent PSP and Vita.