CHDK is great, but Canon's point&shoot cameras are so hackable because Canon made it so (you just have to put something on SD, no need for permanent firmware change), presumably for their own internal reasons (easier debugging?).

This is a question that bothers me a great deal - with all the flourishing of Open Source, are our systems on average getting more Open?

What's the disadvantage of openness for Canon? It's not like the firmware was limiting features as a way of artificially segmenting the market, so they're not losing revenue because of circumvented price discrimination. Presuming that there are controls outside the firmware's control which prevent hardware damage (and therefore warranty claims), what's the issue with limiting customer service and warranty claims to only issues experienced with the standard firmware?

Why not go a step further and ship the camera with a grandma-friendly firmware but host an open source community which provides various Canon-curated firmware versions? What could be done to make Canon's cameras suitable for even more cool hacks? How could this not sell cameras? Those most trusted by non-techies to recommend products surely would hold more favorable opinions of those cameras as a result.

CHDK is amazing, not least because it runs on such a wide range of cameras. I'm doing some book scanning at the moment using a home-made scanning support, Tesseract OCR software, and an ancient A570 camera running CHDK so I can get a remote shutter. Setting the whole thing up was far less painful than expected.

CHDK is an awesome hack.

Last time I've heard of it, no DSLRs was supported, only PowerShots. It looks like they managed to get custom firmwares working for the 400D, 550D and the 5D mkII — still all very alpha stage, but that's very good news. :)