[bee_rider]

It isn’t a Pyrrhic victory, the open source community isn’t harmed if Sony takes the code and doesn’t contribute back. Is it selfish of Sony? Sure. But it doesn’t harm the project, it just fails to help.

The open source community is in the end just a bunch of developers who share their solutions to help each other out. If other parties copy their stiff, it doesn’t make the open source community’s problems un-solved.

The year of Linux on the desktop would be a total nightmare, can you imagine a bunch of non-technical bug reports and feature requests hitting all these mostly volunteer projects? What a mess.

[pjmlp]

Ah, that is why the community tries so hard to break hardware and reverse engineer devices...

[bee_rider]

This seems like a total non-sequitur, unless there’s a link I don’t see?

The people try really hard to get working the systems they are interested in, and then share their results. I mean there are various wikis out there with big lists of printers and wifi dongles (thankfully less of a thing nowadays) that are listed in states of:

* I actually could try this on my side and it works

* This brand usually has drivers, good luck!

* Totally unusable.

Imagine if a company with a customer service relationship, like Microsoft, went around dropping support for reasonably recent hardware! It would be seen as a sure sign that they’d betrayed their customers and dropped all pretense of competence. But the expectations for a community project are happily different.