Stardate 20011023.1205 (On Screen): Sony is going to release a version of the PlayStation 2 which can run Linux. They're committing economic suicide by doing this. Their economic model is to sell the consoles at a considerable loss, and to make the money on royalties from sales of games. But if the PS2 can run Linux, then it actually becomes a respectable and very cheap small server, not too dissimilar to the Qube I'm using to host
USS Clueless except that it would be vastly cheaper. Thus there will be an incentive for people to purchase PS2's, install Linux on them, and use them as disk servers or web servers or for any of the other things that Linux would be good for. What they
won't be doing is buying games for them; who wants to bring their web server down to play Super Mario Brothers? Every user who buys a console from Sony for the primary purpose of running Linux on it will cost Sony money. This will increase the installed base of the PS2 but not increase the sales of royalty-bearing games.
I expect something like this to happen with the xBox, too; as configured it will actually make a very decent small server with the proper software. In fact, in nearly every way its hardware is vastly superior to my Qube. Microsoft surely won't be the ones to do it, but someone will manage to adapt Linux to run on it directly from a CD drive. But that's because beneath the plastic the xBox is a PC, so it should not be too difficult to adapt one of the existing distributions to run on it. The PS2, however, has a radically different architecture; its CPU is a MIPS and its display subsystem is quite unique. Adapting Linux to it is probably beyond what outsiders could do. Sony itself did it because the PS2 acts as its own development system. But to distribute that widely is to undermine their business model. (discuss)
