Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Sometime the world is full of contradiction. On one side you have Sony that fight on the ground of DRM and put spyware on their music discs, and the other hand you can run Linux on their devices. I think it is more related to the organization of the company and how they are business driven. In that case Linux is business driven.

• Running Linux on Playstation 3. The Playstation was rumored to include lot of anti-freedom features, include one that would mark the game media to not play it in another machine after the first time (to avoid the used game market). I don't know what happened to it, but apparently it is gone. But you can run Linux on the Playstation 3 and it is supported by Sony. Note that Playstation 2 had a similar option as well. But the Playstation 3 might be able to provide a decent hardware platform for distributed computing with its cell-processor.

• Mylo to ship, and it runs Linux and Qtopia. Not cheap either: USD$350.

Linux on phones is spreading.

• Installing GPE on a Motorola A780. But for now you lose the phone functionality.

• OpenMoko or the open source platform for cell-phone with a decent price. They claim to be exclusively open source. It is based on Linux and Gtk/X11 leveraging the OpenEmbedded platform. Some interesting point is that the phone module is separate and communicate with a serial connection.

Time to port AbiWord on GPE and OpenMoko? We already have a Maemo version.