Is this another scam?

[Coro]

Well, let's remember the court precedents: Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. hotz

In the end, GeoHot agreed to an agreement under pain of punishment.

SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT v. CONNECTIXCORP., 203 F.3d 596 (9th Cir. 2000) decided in favor of CONNECTIXCORP, but Sony eventually bought out and closed the entity.

when you say "precedents" it think you mean "former lawsuits"...and your proof that any court case would be lost to sony is...george gave up and made a deal, plus sony lost the case but bought the defendant's software afterwards to prevent its distribution.

you know we sued sony over removing linux? WE WON. (you had to prove you bought a new ps3 for linux to claim monies so of course sony did not pay much.)

 

[STLcardsWS]

Well, let's remember the court precedents: Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. hotz

In the end, GeoHot agreed to an agreement under pain of punishment.

it was a case SETTLED as you mentioned, but there was no court ruling or opinion made.
So would be no point or legal reason to bring that up. To justify any claims
A lawyer should know a case filed and then settled would have no bearing other, then the public information produced up until the settlement occurred.

Sony sued to scare, they settled to keep the same old grey area intact.
They had no reason to settle with Geohot other then to scare him / others and to avoid a trial ruling.. If they thought they would win the case, they would of just pursued and got a ruling, then been able to do more with that ruling in the future. Sony settling for what they did and when they did, it was very telling.

Sony did not want this to go to trial, They wanted to exercise a scare into a settlement,

There is a "grey area" but its not so grey it's more black and white when you start to look at other consumer laws and how the laws view other industries that have already been ruled on, It already been lawful to jailbreak other device's courts have ruled and its also legal to tinder and modify your purchased items, that does not go well for Sony in any court arguments., Consumer's have more legal rights in this case at least in my country.. Sony knew and knows this but the approach was not for legal ruling but to scare and discourage other's.

At that time Sony was still struggling with the PS3. was overpriced and game devs were having trouble creating games that showed off the PS3 and would justify a price.,
So I do understand why Sony was active on those fronts. but if ruling are made they would not be able to do a bully approach they have been doing in the past to get certain people out of the scene. Sony has lost many lawsuit's. they know laws are not on their side always.

So really that is not a good example to use of Geohot, because if Sony is willing to settle in a Civl Case like that, Then its quite telling how they viewed chances themselves and what the objective's were in the filling of the civil suit

 

[GuilloteTesla]

And let's remember that Geohot's settlement with Sony, lead to Geohot himself working for Sony on the condition of him never disclosing his findings on the PS3 nor trying to exploit Sony products ever again.

Also, Sony was very smart in releasing their Playstation Bug Bounty program for the PS4 and PS5.

 

[STLcardsWS]

Also, Sony was very smart in releasing their Playstation Bug Bounty program for the PS4 and PS5.

Yes and No.

I do not think its good for homebrew development overall, one can argue it fuels piracy more so then homebrew development.

Piracy takes less effort, then homebrew projects often. So when you shrink the community and that is what the bounty programs REALLY do.

Its preventing current firmware exploits, which i think are needed at least once in any console's history. (otherwise its throttled)., but who knows after the lifespan of the PS4 it could explode.
Right now the program throttles the scene and that is more so the purpose of it from Sony

.

 

[GuilloteTesla]

Yes and No.

I do not think its good for homebrew development overall, one can argue it fuels piracy more so then homebrew development.

Piracy takes less effort, then homebrew projects often. So when you shrink the community and that is what the bounty programs REALLY do.

Its preventing current firmware exploits, which i think are needed at least once in any console's history. (otherwise its throttled)., but who knows after the lifespan of the PS4 it could explode.
Right now the program throttles the scene and that is more so the purpose of it from Sony

.

I said it was a smart move from Sony as a company, but not good for the homebrew scene. Although, people like TheFlow release their findings once they've claimed the price, so we can enjoy some of it.

I think the best motivation for exploiting a console is piracy, always was, always will be (until the games are required to be played 100% online). That or pissing of customers (and hackers) like Sony did when they removed advertised software features like the OtherOS removal and pursuit people that exploited their product.

 

[wishing4thesun]

That or pissing of customers (and hackers) like Sony did when they removed advertised software features like the OtherOS removal and pursuit people that exploited their product.

OtherOS actually seemed kinda cool

Also that lawsuit was over ten years ago, Sony probably aren't going to give a rat's arse given the console doesn't push them much money anymore and they're probably running what's left of the PS3's online infrastructure at a waste of resources (to them at least)

I think the best motivation for exploiting a console is piracy, always was, always will be

Pretty much always has been, you can doll it up as much as you like with words like 'backups' and 'homebrew' but at the end of the day the biggest reason people mod their consoles, the average person, is 'OMG free gaemz!!11!!1' not so they can play homebrew clones of FOSS games.

On a note, BSD 3-clause might actually be suitable for the project going forth. It's also relatively easy to understand from a users' standpoint, as well as a legal standpoint, too - GPL and MPL feel more like they're written in a way that can be interpreted in various different manners and it can be confusing (plus I think rms is a paranoid twat): https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause/

BSD 3-clause has this in it:

3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

 

[NiQ]

OtherOS actually seemed kinda cool

Also that lawsuit was over ten years ago, Sony probably aren't going to give a rat's arse given the console doesn't push them much money anymore and they're probably running what's left of the PS3's online infrastructure at a waste of resources (to them at least)


Pretty much always has been, you can doll it up as much as you like with words like 'backups' and 'homebrew' but at the end of the day the biggest reason people mod their consoles, the average person, is 'OMG free gaemz!!11!!1' not so they can play homebrew clones of FOSS games.

On a note, BSD 3-clause might actually be suitable for the project going forth. It's also relatively easy to understand from a users' standpoint, as well as a legal standpoint, too - GPL and MPL feel more like they're written in a way that can be interpreted in various different manners and it can be confusing (plus I think rms is a paranoid twat): https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause/

BSD 3-clause has this in it:

3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

OtherOS was really neat because back in 2006 the PS3 was a compute powerhouse. The U.S. air force bought hundreds if not thousands of them and clustered them together to form a supercomputer. That was actually pretty bad for Sony, because it sold the first models at a loss of $200/unit, and if you bought a console but never bought any games because you only used it for OtherOS (or as a Blu-Ray player, which had also happened) that's a net loss. I wonder if that was part of the reasons behind Sony's decision to remove the feature.

Regarding the BSD license - It's a permissive license so theoretically there's a risk of someone monetizing off your work, although in the case of HEN I don't see a way to do that anyway. Still - someone could create a fork with added features and not share their source code back so I personally always choose GPL or even AGPL unless it's a very minor project.
If you do use BSD license, at the very least make sure it's the 2 or 3 clause and not accidentally the original 4 clause one, which is GPL-incompatible.

 

[wishing4thesun]

Still - someone could create a fork with added features and not share their source code back so I personally always choose GPL or even AGPL unless it's a very minor project.

How does the GPLv3 protect against anyone who creates a private fork, and then compiles binaries that are not shared (... or if they are, they're not shared on any public front)? Also, does it have something similar to the 3rd clause of the BSD licence? I haven't actually read the whole thing so do excuse my ignorance.

AGPL... seems kind of extreme IMO, though the only thing that springs to mind when I hear it is when Oracle switched BerkeleyDB to AGPL just to piss a bunch of people off.

 

[GuilloteTesla]

What about Creative Commons license?.

If my memory doesn't fail me, you can use the content, even alter it but not profit from it. It is mostly used for media, but I believe it applies for software too to some degree.

 

[NiQ]

How does the GPLv3 protect against anyone who creates a private fork, and then compiles binaries that are not shared (... or if they are, they're not shared on any public front)? Also, does it have something similar to the 3rd clause of the BSD licence? I haven't actually read the whole thing so do excuse my ignorance.

AGPL... seems kind of extreme IMO, though the only thing that springs to mind when I hear it is when Oracle switched BerkeleyDB to AGPL just to piss a bunch of people off.

Indeed, nothing prevents you from not sharing your fork at all but that obviously puts a huge restriction on what you can do. Suppose Sony somehow managed to block the installation of HFW on OFW but then someone found a way of bypassing that but decided they want to monetize (for the sake of argument we'll ignore the high possibility of getting sued by Sony). If they don't use any GPL code they can sell their tool, but if they use any GPL code then their own tool becomes GPL and they have to release the source code as well, which effectively makes it free (both libre and gratis). Indeed they can decide to just keep it to themselves but then the only way they can monetize is by offering the jailbreak as a service, meaning that people would have to physically bring in their consoles - and that severely restricts the customer base.
Regarding AGPL - It's mainly useful for network based tools. One of the best examples for something that would make sense to place under AGPL is the Flash Writer tool. If you place it under normal GPL then someone could fork it (let's say next year when 4.91 may be released) but decide to only offer it as a hosted service. AGPL would require them to offer a self-hosted version as well (of course, assuming they want to release it to the public at all).

What about Creative Commons license?.

If my memory doesn't fail me, you can use the content, even alter it but not profit from it. It is mostly used for media, but I believe it applies for software too to some degree.

CC licenses are used for artistic works (e.g., photos, music, videos etc.), they're not suitable for software. Well, there are some cases where hybrid licenses would make sense. For instance, if you want to create a game and don't want closed-source forks it'd make sense to license the game engine and scripts under GPL, while other game assets such as graphics, sounds and basically anything that's not code be licensed under CC-BY-SA.

 

[wishing4thesun]

Indeed, nothing prevents you from not sharing your fork at all but that obviously puts a huge restriction on what you can do. Suppose Sony somehow managed to block the installation of HFW on OFW but then someone found a way of bypassing that but decided they want to monetize (for the sake of argument we'll ignore the high possibility of getting sued by Sony). If they don't use any GPL code they can sell their tool, but if they use any GPL code then their own tool becomes GPL and they have to release the source code as well, which effectively makes it free (both libre and gratis). Indeed they can decide to just keep it to themselves but then the only way they can monetize is by offering the jailbreak as a service, meaning that people would have to physically bring in their consoles - and that severely restricts the customer base.
Regarding AGPL - It's mainly useful for network based tools. One of the best examples for something that would make sense to place under AGPL is the Flash Writer tool. If you place it under normal GPL then someone could fork it (let's say next year when 4.91 may be released) but decide to only offer it as a hosted service. AGPL would require them to offer a self-hosted version as well (of course, assuming they want to release it to the public at all).

AGPL sounds like the way to go then. I really appreciate the informative, explanatory reply.

 

[Coro]

IIRC hen had GPL v3 text in the dev zip or in the repo long ago. of course my memory is bad, so maybe i made it up...