George Hotz's personal blog "geohot got sued" is, if anything, an entertaining read. It's part allusion to the frustrations that accompany being the focal point of Sony's anti-hacker litigation, and part off-the-cuff rambling on issues surrounding the court case. Hotz may not be legally allowed to discuss specific details, but that doesn't mean he won't dish on other subjects - like Sony's raid on German hacker Alexander Egorenkov's home and past quotes from the company's upper management which framed homebrew and other OS capabilities in a much better light.
Pointing to SCEA President Jack Tretton's comment about homebrew support, Hotz unfortunately missed an important distinction that is readily apparent in the original source - a mailbag Q&A: he is referring to the PSP, not the PS3.
Whether Hotz honestly missed this fact or not, it's certainly worth noting. When Tretton said, "I think that is something in the works. We certainly see some of the stuff that has been done via homebrew, and it's incredibly creative. And I think we'd like to try and tap into that a little bit more," he was speaking strictly about Sony's portable system.
It is feasible, if odd, for the company to view each machine in a different light. But when it comes to the removal of Linux/Other OS support for the PS3, that's when things get complicated. Geoff Levand, a software engineer at Sony, said in early 2010 how Sony would not disable Other OS support via firmware updates. We all know how that turned out.
Originally, Sony touted the PlayStation 3 as more computer than game machine. The 'father of the PlayStation' Ken Kutaragi said as much in 2006 mere months before its launch: "We don't say it's a game console. PlayStation 3 is clearly a computer." Whether that was just PR talk or not, clearly Sony had a change of heart somewhere down the line. If the PS3 was actually a computer its capabilities would be increased, not removed.
A big sticking point for hackers like Hotz is that Sony removing functionality from the console led them to hack it; had Sony not removed Linux and Other OS applications, things might have turned out differently. Doubtful, based on comments from Hotz and compatriot Egorenkov, the latter pointing out how he couldn't live without hacking.
