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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Linux on playstation was a play by Sony not to have customs like on a toy but as a more favorable computer merchandise. They didn't care.

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Linux on Playstation was the final hubris of Ken Kutaragi to have his insane CPU design take over computing. Kutaragi envisaged the PS3 becoming a standard hardware platform similar to the PC but fully controlled by Sony. That was their goal with the PS3, they said so themselves time and time again. The second Kutaragi was removed from power over at Playstation, they closed the Other OS function.

It was the last time that a Japanese company made a fundamentally Japanese move.

> fully controlled by Sony.

And Toshiba and IBM, it was a three-way collab. There was even a second-generation Cell (PowerXCell 8i) released in IBM Q Series blade-servers.

Yeah. pretty much PowerPC part two. PowerPC the business move, like the oroginal one.

> It was the last time that a Japanese company made a fundamentally Japanese move.

What do you mean by this?

It's certainly an extremely bizarre and false statement. Curious what he meant as well.

Nope, that was with YA BASIC.

There were different customs for different countries targetted with different tactics.

Ya basic was only one front in that war.

Sure, if we disregard that PS2 Linux came almost two years later, was only sold via Internet, added an extra 500 euros on top, although it got discounted into 300 euros at the end of PS2 lifetime.

I own one such kit.

That doesn't factor into it, because the tariffs, bans, etc they were trying to circumvent weren't dependent on the software shipping with the device in that case, nor the separate price of the software, nor were they even necessarily primarily targeting Europe.

Each of these schemes had different sets of regulatory checkboxes they were trying to tick, and so had very different end products.

Sure as you wish, I was a PlayStation fanboy back then, since Yaroze, and surely remember YA BASIC for PS2 and Other OS for PS 3, being the only ones.

Yaroze and PS2 Linux never had anything to do with tariffs.

Not sure where you're coming from on that since it was a well-known and somewhat mocked at the time fact when Sony argued with UK customs

https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/playstation-2-is-...

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