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Even though the OtherOS feature was crippled, there was almost no news of PS3 piracy and jailbreaking the whole time it was available. I sometimes wonder if Sony will learn from this, but then I return to my senses.

The lesson is to not allow standard ports or a foreign OS. Both are unneeded security risks. Consoles should be black mystery boxes that only connect to non-standard devices.

The security on the ps3 is rather impressive and they deserve credit for keeping it uncracked this long. After the ps3 was first released I read endless comments about how trying to prevent hacking was futile and that it would be cracked in a year.

Their efforts were not futile given the number of games they were able to release without piracy. They still control access to PSN and they can keep playing the firmware update game. Not only can they tie games to firmware but blu-ray movies as well.

Even a proprietary application dynamically linked against GPL libraries is OK to distribute, because the proprietary application does not include the GPL libraries. With dynamic linking, the libraries are assumed to be already installed on the end user system, and the proprietary application just calls them. This is fully within the GPL terms ... anyone may simply run the GPL code for any purpose.

A problem only comes about when a proprietary application statically links in a GPL library. This means that the GPL code is now included within the proprietary application. The proprietary application now becomes a derived work according to the definitions of copyright law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derived_work


When it is statically linked the GPL library is included in the proprietary application, the GPL code is a copyright-protected element of an original, previously created first work, and a whole library is indeed a "major element" of the whole work.

According to copyright law, rights to the derived work are in such a case jointly held by the authors of the separate elements that make up the work. The joint owners must come to an agreement about distribution rights with respect to the derived work. If the authors of the proprietary code within the derived work wish to have distribution rights for the derived work, then they must get permission from the authors of all other parts of the derived work which were written by other parties.

The GPL alone does not give such permission. Another license must be sought.

Note that the LGPL license DOES actually give such permission as an exception to the copyleft terms of the GPL. For this very reason, many libraries are licensed under LGPL rather than GPL.

Edited 2010-09-08 04:15 UTC

You realize that the FSF disagrees? They (and I believe Richard Stallman) hold that even dynamically linking constitutes a derived work, although that is only their opinion.

This is the interpretation of some. Others, for instance the Free Software Foundation, believe that dynamic linking is creating a derivative work. For this reason, they have created the LGPL (which does allow dynamic linking in proprietary applications, but not static linking).