This has always been the hacker spirit. Make things designed to do one thing do another thing. If it's against the hardware maker's intentions or just completely outside their expectation, even better!
Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
92.2M units sold, as of today 1 unit? running Linux.
Not everything needs to have political, teenage angst applied to it.
90M+ consoles sold is proof society has completely accepted the idea of a locked ecosystem with hardware they don’t get to control.
I think you are misinterpreting that number. It would be better read as "as of today, the first PS5 running Linux". There were people running racks of PS3s as Linux servers back in the day not as gaming stations but compute using its hardware. People will do crazy things. Do not write them off.
The reason they care whether your commercial software is licensed is that their business model is charging for software licenses for that software.
Once there were indications that people were very much interested in, and working on, running rips of commercial games on PS3 Linux, and/or leveraging OtherOS to jailbreak a stock PS3, it was basically game over for OtherOS/PS3 Linux, in spite of the fact that it had been advertised on the box (of the original "fat" PS3) as a feature of the system.
Piracy (in the running unlicensed commercial games/copyright infringement sense) had long been the killer app for jailbreaking, including mod chips (and other schemes for playing CD-R "backups") for the PS1 and PS2, as well as PSP jailbreaks and custom firmware; homebrew notwithstanding, the most popular use was playing commercial games without paying for them.
Sony also nerfed the original 5-console installation (aka "game sharing") for PSN games after players organized public game sharing web sites to split the cost of games 5 ways.
"No one could have predicted this!" as they (don't) say.
Try filing a warranty claim if it bends, the manufacturer will go and tell you to kick rocks.
(This is supposed to be satire but feels scarily accurate anyway.)
The whole set of software IP rules seems like mental gymnastics to justify a career (that I like, support, and benefit from) rather than rules that come from axioms or ethics that make sense.
The PS5 is a games console and is marketed as such, not a general-purpose computer. Of course they want, and "force", you to use it to play PS5 games. I have a hard time seeing this as coercive when computers still exist, even if architecturally a PS5 is virtually identical to a general-purpose computer in most of the ways that matter, because at least since the Fairchild Channel F, it's always been the case that consoles are just constrained computers.
> Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
> We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
Imagine, for instance, if that flat head screwdriver had a means to prevent you from using it to pry things open. Some kind of magical negative mass in the handle that kicks in to cancel out leverage but not torque, or an explosive charge that blows your hand off if more than a certain amount of force is applied non-rotationally, or something. It might seem a little less risible then, and you would probably just opt to buy a screwdriver that doesn't have such restrictions (especially if those restrictions were explosively enforced).
Like, I get it. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that we should be able to do whatever we want with hardware that we own. At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.
Except that's so completely not like what's going on with modern hardware. They're taking general purpose computers and restricting you from doing general purpose computing on them. Like, a dishwasher is made to wash dishes. It has a shape and a design made for washing dishes. You would need to make physical modifications to get it to wash clothes. This is like taking a machine that could wash both dishes and clothes and intentionally stopping it from washing clothes.
This is not OK. This needs to stop. Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
But so much tech hardware is commodified. A pregnancy test probably isn't using hardware dissimilar to your laptop. It just has less of it.
I don't think there's an expectation that every electronic is user programmable. But anything that is general phrpose should be punished as such for trying to put in excessive restrictions. There are arguments for game consoles on both aisles, but I don't agree with the mentality of "anything with general hardware needs general programming ability"
Sony has had this business model since the original PlayStation (1994), but it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ability to run Linux on your PC, or to have a Linux-based game console like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine.
You may also be surprised that some people consider the fixed-function design of game consoles to be a positive thing.
Steam Deck is a gaming-focused handheld PC. It has a software certification system similar in function to what you see on console. If a user sticks within that environment, they essentially have the "console experience". There could be less friction with stronger certification enforcement, but Valve are consciously less strict for ideological and practical reasons. Is Steam Deck fixed function? Valve seems to intend it to be so, they just provide options for those who want to break free of the default gaming-centric environment.
Sony could provide an optionally accessible VM running a Linux distro, providing access to an open environment to install and run the stores that they want. Would it break their business model? Maybe, but no one is entitled to business models that are blatantly anti-competitive. It also wouldn't prevent it from being a fixed function console for those who want that, given that engagement with those features would remain a choice.
"Fixed function" isn't an excuse to build a vertical monopoly. It's been a long time coming for the console razor blade marketing model to come under scrutiny and Sony meets the criteria of being a gatekeeper under EU's DMA. When I look at what Microsoft is doing with Helix (which everyone else seems to be confused by) I get the feeling that Microsoft is anticipating exactly that outcome and getting out ahead of it.
> Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
You... haven't noticed all of the existing DRM features?