Shortly after Sony released their Playstation Portable, or PSP, a community of hackers -- "homebrew" enthusiasts -- began tweaking, modifying and otherwise altering the device's software (and even its hardware) to better suit their needs or just to experiment.
You can see how things are going by visiting this site:
Of course, this sort of customer intervention, which turns passive 'consumers' into very active co-producers, wasn't viewed too kindly by Tokyo: the usual round of lawsuits and threatened lawsuits were unleashed like Odin's wild hunt.
Why is any of this important or at least, interesting?
The homebrew crowd is putting one of the fundamental ideas of FOSS into action: user participation and mastery of technology -- at whatever level is of interest and possible. This is the hacker ethos long espoused by the 2600 group: computers aren't really the point, the point is your right to probe, understand and (where appropriate and non-harmful) modify complex systems.
The phone phreakers (wikipedia "phreaking" for info) did things some people objected to and found alarming. Whether these were truly objectionable or alarming things is another matter. At heart however, they simply wanted to understand the workings of one of the most intricate technologies ever built: the international telephone system.
...
For me, whatever the warts (and we've read a lot about these in this and related threads) the chief benefit of the ideas energizing FOSS is that they encourage people -- or at least, try to encourage people -- to become more mindful of how their technosphere works. For billions of people, science and technology seem to be magical - you read a news item about transgenics and wonder how we got from stone knives and bear skins to remixing spider and goat dna (wikipedia "biosteel" for info).
It all seems to be a vast and mysterious black box.
FOSS says, "open the damn box and find out what's going on!" You don't have to re-engineer the box if you haven't the knack or the inclination or the time but for god's sake you should at least bother to spare a thought for what the box does - where it came from, how it got into your life, what impact it has on your situation and prospects.
...
Really, this is an analog of the leftie cry for people to achieve a 'true' consciousness that replaces their supposedly false one. When someone hereabouts sternly advises Democrat-favoring listmembers to abandon illusion and see the US' 'true' political structure, they are demanding a peek behind the curtain, a probing of a complex system.
This is essentially what FOSS demands though primarily focused on software, and by extension, the entire technological infrastructure.
.d.
At this point, it's still not clear that intelligence and self-awareness are successful adaptations.
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/