Koush Turns Down Sony Over Geohot
If you’re reading our site you probably have heard of Koushik Dutta for his Windows Mobile APIs or his Android exploits. Well Sony reached out to him in connection with a software engineer job at Sony and he informed them that he couldn’t work for Sony because of the legal actions they’ve brought against George Hotz (geohot) who figured out a PS3 key that permits for homebrew. Here’s the email exchange:
Koush is responsible for a ton of what we commonly call hacking but I don’t want to portray what he does as illegal. He’s a hugely knowledgeable coder and tinkerer that has made all of our devices better to use and he’s an asset that I bet a lot of companies would love to have. Well, at least Sony was interested and now thanks to their own actions that’s off the table. Maybe MS’s approach of inviting the Chevron team to work with them proves to be the way to get the real passionate software devs out there.
via Make
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Wow talk about integrity ! Amazing in this day and age, you have. My respect.
@DK. Double standards David. What is hacking in your opinion? If you get something without permission is that hacking? I’m so confused with your articles. One minute you are complaining how hacked Google Android and marketplace can be and the next minute you are not categorizing certain obvious hacks and all at the same time you pirating tethering or mobile hotspot access from AT&T. Oh boy, my head is swimming.
I like George and Koushik as I have an Android Phone and a PS3 (both rooted/hacked what ever you want to call it) and I think the way PS treated George was downright wrong but when you play around an ant bed, there is a chance you will get a few bites. I don’t sugar coat any pirating or hacking. It is what it is and we should call it like that.
@RowdyC: The things that Geohot and Koush are doing have legit purposes. Just like the Chevron guys. They are not doing what they’re doing to get free software. What they’re doing is trying to remove barriers to run legal third party apps that are otherwise blocked. For George the goal was to load his own software onto the phone – same as the Chevron guys. That’s different than someone showing you how to remove DRM for example. Of course, if you’re goal is ‘A’ but the result is ‘B’ then it at least looks bad. With the Chevron guys there was still another layer (or two) that prevents sideloading illegal apps (DRM plus server side calls for notifcations).
When you look at what’s happening on Android and people downloading apks and then reuploading them as their own…well that’s clearly something different.