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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux).

Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those without access to supercomputers are the ones to suffer from this decision.

Sony had to appeal to their gaming community over the science community so that's that.

Also it's 'OtherOS' not 'OpenOS'.

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(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad)

Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal.

Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new hardware turns. It was a company wide goal to hit break even at retail pricing at that time (Sony was amazing at running hardware coat forecasting internally and iirc hit their 7 year Target by a week). This required the new hardware. So they dropped Linux. That part is real.

Then they effed up by not messaging it well and by dropping promised back support.

And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and attacked sonys main business and released products that allowed others to infringe Sony and other game studios property with impunity. These actions killed any chance Sony would engage with this community for the next decade or so.

Sony was also backed into a corner technically as I recall as the thing hot hacked (by realizing it was a null crypto key on the one processor), and thus allowed Linux was also the thing that did the drm. Sony had to choose between another year or so of drm or Linux support.

As in many cases not parties are at fault. Contracts can and are broken. Sony paid multiple prices for it. So did the Linux/hacker community.

I am taken aback a bit by this characterisation:

    And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and

Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony.

Sony has a massive internal conflict of interest by being both a content creator and a hardware provider. They sabotage their own products to the detriment of their customers again and again.

Sony worked with the community for a few years, and had the longest unhacked console to show for it. Then They slapped the community in the face and paid dearly for it, as the should. Sony should beg the community for another chance.

> Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony.

I hadn't bought any Sony hardware at that moment so IIRC I just decided right there and then that there was no reason to send money Sonys way or feel sorry for them.

First Sony console I bought was a used PS3 sometime after PS4 was released. And I was enthusiastic about PS when they first released the console with Linux support.

I guess I'm not the only one.

I have a feeling that many people who complained were not affected because they either never used Linux or they only used Linux and could just not upgrade. I understand that in theory Sony should have fixed their hypervisor bugs and kept OtherOS working, but I also understand that the world isn't perfect.

Why would many people complain if they were not affected? That seems like an odd conspiracy theory.

If you wait till you're affected, it's too late. Take secure boot for example - should we wait until there are no computers on the market where the user can unlock it, before we complain? Because that's what it would take for someone intent on buying an unlockable computer to be affected.

You can apply this to any other infringement on freedom.

http://slashdot.org

When you have a legitimate beef or problem with someone, you don't take illegitimate and illegal actions against them. I'm all for reverse engineering. That's fine.

Extorting a company by threatening them with release of an exploit if you don't get your way is not legitimate, that's blackmail or extortion.

All of the hackers attacking Sony for months, disabling PSN, is not legitimate, and should never have been supported by anyone.

Just let the courts handle it like they should and did.

> illegal actions against them

What's illegal about reverse engineering a physical product you sell to someone?

> Disabling psn

Are you kidding me? The PSN was notriously insecure. Sony didn't give a crap until they were embarassed.

Read my post.

Reverse engineering legal and to me moral.

Extorting a company with a threat of release of a thing to get what you want: extortion and illegal. This was done by people around hots.

Agreed: psn was insecure. Hacking is still illegal.

By taking these actions we lost the moral high ground as hackers. The class action by itself would be just fine

The class action only happened because it was hacked. Sony just threw up it's hands and said "we don't care" until they were forced to.

>you don't take illegitimate and illegal actions against them.

What sony did is illegal.

That is what courts are for not viglante action

My recollection is that the PS3/Linux thing was a failed tax dodge, because that meant you could classify the system as a general purpose computer instead of a game console. When the EU decided to categorize it as a game console anyway, they killed the Linux project.

Wasn't that the PS2?

I recall they offered a "Linux" kit with mouse/keyboard, network/HDD adapter (so limited for fat models only) and a VGA cable to use with a computer monitor with sync-on-green support...

No, this reads like you working there has just made you immune to seeing all the missteps. No one made them do all the scuffed Sony custom logic they keep putting into their devices, causing all this overhead and compromise on engineering. No one pressured them into the ever more convoluted, bound-to-fail DRM schemes.

> This required the new hardware. So they dropped Linux.

Lack of support for new hardware does not explain why they dropped support for early hardware.

It's pretty simple. You pay for something with a headline capability. Capability is removed.

You no longer have the thing you paid for.

Honestly, your attitude is rather shocking.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

As someone who was on the dev side of the fence at that time one of the areas where Sony was pretty poor was the devtools. Other than some hardware capabilities of the profiler Microsoft blew away everything else that Sony had.

While running Linux on it was pretty neat, I wonder what the opportunity cost was to other parts of the development experience on the platform.

> And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and attacked sonys main business and released products that allowed others to infringe Sony and other game studios property with impunity. These actions killed any chance Sony would engage with this community for the next decade or so.

Which sony regulary acts with impunity of being toxic towards it's users. (One thing to note: you can never get a refund on something you "bought" or something that was fraudulently bought on your PSN account. Do a charge back on a psn purchase, you loose all of your entitlements you purchased before)

The notion that it is more reasonable to remove a feature that you advertised for instead of losing drm just blows my mind.

I think the thing that you are missing is that DRM is a key feature required by game publishers. Games is the main use of the platform and the reason it exists.

Selling a Linux box isn't. One can argue that selling a Linux box at a loss is a dumb idea. One can argue doing so helped super computing to the masses and was a good gesture. However when the reason the box is subsidized is threatened then it's pretty rational to remove the thing threatening it.

This was definitely a lesser of 2 evils for Sony business choice. They misjudged how much people cared about Linux. As others have misjudged other ads like no man's sky.

The game publishers are not your clients, the people buying the console are.

This doesn't take anything away from Sony's decision making, but removing OtherOS never really helped them "get good security".

The PlayStation 3 was cracked wide open [1] without OtherOS and because people were pissed at its removal. On Playstation 3s released in the first 3.5 years of its lifespan you can get full hypervisor compromise without any hardware mods, and you can yet again run OtherOS on the latest firmware. Now with less restrictions than before. Newer PS3s (starting with CECH-25xx) have 'only' been partially compromised. They can't run OtherOS, but they can still run homebrew and piracy despite Sony taking OtherOS away.

Maybe it's a bit of solace that this stuff only punished Sony. But inevitably, the lesson they learnt is "we'll never experiment with this stuff again".

[1]: This video is really worth watching if you're interested in this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUGGJpn2_zY

To play the devil's advocate, Sony is in the business of selling games, their cosnoles were just a means to that and since they were selling the hardware at a loss, selling more of it to people who will never buy games was bad for their business model.

There was no reason they couldn’t have sold a slightly less locked-down system to researchers at a higher price point —- Microsoft did exactly that with unsold X360 Kinect units (and bundled in a USB adapter) for medical research.

Cell processor shipped for commercial installation in the IBM Blades QS20/QS21/QS22, which was based on Roadrunner supercomputer.

Sony also demoed rack-mount with Cell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zego) but it is not clear that it was available in open market

The reason was cost. Have fun convincing management to allocate resources to develop and support another SKU tailored for researchers.

You don't need to - just license it out to a third-party systems integrator.

So what? Don't need much difference in hardware, it was only a firmware change.

Firmware changes that relax the security of your hardware require a lot of red tape and raise much fear in management.

SONY is infamous for going overboard on DRM.

It is time and not a priority.

A lot of things can be done given unlimited time and resources, but unfortunately we don’t have that.

To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

The consoles that existed in the 70s and 80s were largely justified in being specialized hardware specifically for realtime rendering which had no realistic application outside the narrow scope of fixed function realtime interactive rendering they produced. In the 90s the PS1, N64, and Dreamcast were all computer adjacent with the next geration - PS2 / Gamecube / Xbox - all being perfectly functional general purpose computers that were simply crippled with proprietary software into being toys.

Since then their hardware has only gotten more generic and general purpose and the degree of their draconian platform lockdown grown to an insane degree to resist emulation and unlocking. Its a shame Valve only ever saw SteamOS as a hedge against Microsoft - if they had taken it seriously and put in the legitimate ridiculous amount of money it would have taken to breakout a console platform without the horrifying amount of proprietary bullshit going into the competitions products we might have seen that incredible amount of waste become as taboo as it deserves to be.

Honestly the worst offender is the Nintendo Switch - it is verbatim just the successor device to the Nvidia Shield Tablet, just with a grotesque proprietary operating environment and impenetrably locked bootloader. Every time I see one of those things I am struck by how absurdly wasteful it is to see someone carrying that thing and a regular tablet when Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft could all just be shipping their own proprietary DRM laden store apps on top of a freedom respecting software foundation. If you want to exploit people by depriving software freedoms while they pay you for it... I'd argue its a product of propagandized deception and manipulation, but its still people considered informed consumers buying that garbage. Its a lot less bad than entire computers, fit for a multitude of purposes, being reduced to toys.

> Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

I think this is a bit harsh. Is artwork a waste of good canvas?

(I guess to be fair to you here, at least canvas is a renewable resource)

There isn't an appropriate analogy for IP based DRM because the real world doesn't behave like intellectual property.

I was trying to come up with some convoluted analogy about making art on a gold plated easel that self destructs every decade and burns any canvas besides a specific size that is put on it, but just trying to formulate a physical analog hints at the absurdity of it all.

Actually, wait. You buy a tractor but you can only use it on certain days of the week and it permanently shuts off after 3 years and stops working if you try to attach a snow plow to it. Except that is already the reality of John Deere products being DRM locked and not owned by the buyers.

I thought the John Deere thing was only to the extent that they locked-down their users from tweaking their firmware - not that their firmware actively tries to frustrate use-cases like attaching a plow or disabling the tractor after 3 years?

Ever replaced a blown fuse? Air filter? oil? requires authorized service technician with special lets call the mothership to reauthorize tool.

Valves Proton enabled me to switch fully to Linux once and for all. The few games that wont run now are far more acceptable than not being able to play virtually any mainstream titles. Its surprising how well it works to me and reaffirms my support for Valve and the Steam store.

Have you used a switch? There is no commodity tablet on the market with the attachable controller form factor & dockable with HDMI passthru that the Switch has, at the Switch pricepoint.

Why would you make an open platform with custom hardware when you can make a proprietary locked down one that you can use as an app store % cut mill like what Nintendo does?

They take the air out of the industry with how much money they make operating the way they do. That doesn't make it right, ethical, or reasonable.

If consoles were sold at a profit what you say may make sense. However building an open platform means you need to devote resources to it both from a capital perspective and opportunity cost.

Driving demand towards the hardware, instead of software and licensing costs on a negative margin product is a pretty sure way to run a company out of business.

It has been over a decade since any console hardware product has been sold at a loss. That stopped with the Xbox 360 and PS3. Every Wii, Wii U, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, etc have all been sold at marginal profit.

Why can't console hardware be sold at a profit? Make up for the increased sale price by bundling a rebate on the first X officially-published games the customer buys. Then everything after that is pure profit for the console vendor.

The more likely you are to buy the (cheap-ish) hardware, the more likely they are to sell you more games - at the regular price. Also, there is this balance which is unrelated to the cost of making the hardware, the balance between the buyer’s wanting to actually use the hardware, since it was bought not too cheaply, and not making the price of hardware too high and scare off the potential buyer.

This doesn't matter anyways, consoles haven't been sold at a loss for almost a decade.

This used to be called ‘pack-ins’, no? Like when Sonic was included with a Genesis?

Nintendo has always sold at a profit AFAICT

Nintendo is exactly that, a toy maker. That their toys run on commoditized hardware is a side-effect, not a voluntary choice. They will never ship a general purpose computing device.

Are you saying we should force them with laws?

I would have loved SteamOS to be a general purpose Linux OS with Steam preinstalled instead of the... thing it actually was.

If the experience had been seamless I think it would have taken off.

But it wasn't, mostly due to the games. Many of them would require emulating a mouse just to get into the game, which meant emulating a desktop. Then the game would start and it would switch over to the controller mode.

Many games just didn't work well under it, and so forth.

I haven't installed it myself, but isn't it just a slightly tweaked Debian? I thought you could leave the Big Picture Mode-style UI and get to a desktop where you could install additional software.

Didn't they sell a bunch of PS3s to the US Air Force for research purposes?

I'm sure that military personnel enjoy games as much as the next person, but it's probably not why they bought the machines.

https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...

They did. The article linked above mentions that it took them a while to convince Sony to agree to it.

Also, if you run the math in the article you linked, it may suggest they paid more than list price.

> core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles

> the PS3s for the supercomputer's core cost about $2 million

that's $1,136 per unit.

Definitely a completely different support contract than a consumer console. That sounds more like an amortization of how many consoles they’d need to support that large of a system for the life of the contract.

Could also be the rake you pay to the company who will sell you hardware on terms with a PO.

Company I worked for in the past had a significant line of business with a major post prod company in the valley that was just buying hundreds of DVD players off ebay at a 20% mark up and then drop shipping them.

There's tons of companies and government agencies that cant just send someone to bestbuy with a visa to make purchases. Has to be a preapproved vendor and has to be on at least net 30 terms and purchased via PO. There's a premium to be paid to companies/vendors that can work within your companies processes to quickly get you what you need to not block projects.

I do wonder if PS3 have GSA pricing though.

Plus they eventually got dinged for this because they had inexplicably advertised the Linux support, so removing it turned that into false advertising. Owners of the classic PS3 got a chunk of $ from a class action settlement.

Correction: the lawyers got a chunk of money....

It was never about supporting Linux or scientific computing. They just wanted to pay less taxes. Linux support is what allowed them to argue the PS2 and PS3 were real computers rather than just an entertainment product.

> due to a 'hack' by Geohot

This is OT, but I think people here might enjoy it: Geohot doing hackerrank problems for 5 hours straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EecfVsdQMcM

I'll never buy another Sony console again after they removed the ability to run Linux on the PS3. It's one of the reasons I bought one and I used it a lot.

Do you think that Sony is having executive board meetings worrying about a few Linux users who won’t buy their consoles?

Choosing not to buy products from a company you don't like seems pretty reasonable to me. It doesn't have to be a cunning plot to destroy the company.

True. But it’s like every single random submission about “Why I chose to leave $X”. In the grand scheme of things. No one cares.

Well, obviously, some do. There is always an agenda to be pursued, but you are right in that companies do not care. Even if they say they do.

Im pretty sure they had more than one board meeting worrying about sudden coordinated effort of 'linux nerds' to utterly destroy PS3 security model.

Yes, they share the room with the Facebook executives who worry about the HN users who will quit the social network.

They didn’t remove it. They just ended updates for it so you couldn’t also use an updated console AND have linux support. Software isn’t free, so I people are over entitled if they expect lifetime updates.

Which crippled the console, because you couldn't play games online without updating. And if that wasn't bad enough, soon after you couldn't even play new games offline. I used my PS3 as a backup computer when I was at school (came in handy when my laptop died), so I didn't update it. When I bought Dark Souls, I found out I couldn't play it.

This makes sense. New games could rely on API changes in software. It happens all the time for me as an iOS developer, and we have to make an educated decision on which OS versions to support and which ones not to.

Do you buy Microsoft or Nintendo consoles?

If so why?

I buy Nintendo consoles due to the quality of the software and hardware.

The Nintendo DS, at the time, was unparalleled in terms of software quality, and, while not as portable as a Game Boy Advance, was compatible with my existing GBA collection, allowed me to wirelessly play; and even eventually play online, with friends, and offered an almost dauntingly large library of quality software.

This was before the days of the iPhone, and while I did have a Windows Phone at the time, it never could have, and certainly did not, have the library of software, or hardware design, to consider it a valid console. Being a PDA and a phone was more than enough at the time.

I played ‘Halo’, of all things, on my PowerBook G4 back in the day, saw that as the driver to XBOX, and couldn’t have cared less.

But both of these companies are hostile to Linux... Why would you buy anything from them?

Is it worse to try and fail than to never try at all?

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