There's a wonderful article up on CrunchGear at the moment by Devin Coldewey, entitled the The User’s Manifesto: in defense of hacking, modding, and jailbreaking, in which the author presents a very intelligent and well-reasoned analysis of the scene, pointing out all the legal pros and cons from every angle. True, the article is USA-centric and doesn't mention Symbian, but all the same points apply equally to the modding scene on our devices in the rest of the world (e.g. my own i8910 HD HX adventures). Worth a read.
Read on in the full article.
Hmm... guess my juggling of the clipboard buffer went a bit wrong there.... Thanks. Fixed now.
A great article, very thought provoking.
I have no problem with rooting a phone because I want additional features that are unavailable in the Market (specifically I'm talking about Android here), because the functionality I want isn't available any other way, and is something I've come to use under another ecosystem (I rooted my G1 phone to give me wireless tethering, similar to S60's Joikuspot). I also feel that I've paid full whack for my phone, and that by my actions no-one will be out of pocket.
That said, I don't have an issue with the 'restrictive PS3' firmware - my understanding is the new restrictions are to stop access to the sections of the PS3 which could circumvent anti-piracy protection. The original PS3 console was sold at a huge loss, even now Sony are probably only just about breaking even. The console itself was a loss-leader - so they'd eventually get their money back if the user bought games. You break the piracy protection, then you'll find bazzillions of pirated games being swapped in the playground, the revenue stream for the developer dries up, and no-one would make decent games for the PS3 any more (rather like seems to have happened with the PC gaming scene), to crack my PS3 seems rather like a 'shooting yourself in the foot' exercise, and one which may come back to haunt me if the Xbox Live ban is anything to go by.