[phire]

For example, in the ps3 scene:

Someone developed a exploit, packaged it in usb stick, called it the PSJailbreak, planning to sell it to as a piracy orientated tool. They sent out a few review copies to prove it worked.

One of the reviews obtained a USB trace of the exploit in action, passing it along to a few members of the homebrew scene. The homebrew scene recreated this exploit with an open source implementation (but with the ability to pirate games pirate games superficially patched out) beating the original PSJailbreak to market.

The homebrew scene then set upon developing an open source homebrew devkit.

Many manufactures released their own clone devices of the exploit, the timeframe susgests that they were also working from copies of the PSJailbreak.

It was the homebrew scene who later decimated the PS3 chain of trust, to develop installable modded firmware.