Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Those (many) companies which violate the GPL are far worse, IMHO. You may not like what Sony have done with the Reader's firmware, but it is fully GPL-compliant.
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Oh, my dislike of what Sony has done with Reader's firmware is very minor compared to my dislike for Sony bringing a person who has hacked their PS3 hypervisor (to run Gentoo Linux on platform that was sold to him as being capable of doing so, and then crippled to prevent it) to the court of law.
While it is anything but legally (and morally) clear whether there was a criminal intent, this precedent is very unpleasant can of worms for most of the open source community. If the law takes a stance that a device can be crafted to prevent its use for different purposes, the availability of the hardware for open source applications would be degraded to products that
are sold as development platforms. In general "a development platform" is way more expensive device than of the shelf commercial product, and the availability of cheap platforms is an issue for community based embedded Linux projects.
To bring the discussion a bit closer to our primary interest, HarryT, if hypervisor hacking found to be a criminal activity, it is a very short step of going after kartu and the rest of PRS+ team for their modifications of Sony Reader firmware. After all, their work exists in unpleasant vicinity of the DRM software that is, most certainly, specifically protected by Millenium act, and one could easily argue that these modifications are weakening (or facilitating) attempts to circumvent that (already busted) protection scheme.
Now, while it is practically impossible to argue that Sony would continue to flex their corporate muscles (until they do so, that is), there are no guarantees that they wont.