I feel like that was actually a fairly legitimate removal by Sony. Sony was selling the consoles at a loss in order to make money on the games. People were taking advantage by buying cheap Linux computers, never allowing Sony to recoup money from the initial sale. I don't have much sympathy for the people abusing the system in this particular case. Probably an unpopular opinion around here.
>I don't have much sympathy for the people abusing the system
I disagree with the premise that it's unethical to use a product I purchase and own from a for-profit company for a use that turned out not to be profitable for it. Note that it wasn't much of a hack; Sony sold consoles with the option to install another operating system from its menu [0].
Since the move was so unprofitable to it, Sony should not have offered the option to users in the first place. But since it happened, executives at Sony then just decided that it made business sense for Sony to disable the option in a firmware update.
I just don't understand the framing where it's as if Sony did a favor for its customers who then "took advantage," when Sony just miscalculated a business policy to serve its own self-interest.
They could not do that from the start, but they did, because they planned larger sales. Whether it turns out to be more profitable is their risk, not users. The important change is that people can't have an expectation (a risk) anymore which would turn out to be false a month after. Inability is a much, much lesser issue than a broken expectation.
"OtherOS" was added to evade game console tariffs by claiming the PS3 as a computer, a similar tactic to the one used to attempt to classify the PS2 as a "digital processing unit" to avoid EU import duty.
Sony's removal of OtherOS wasn't just deceptive and an abuse of customers' trust, it was conspiracy to commit customs and tax fraud.
Also, while I bought my PS3 to learn parallel programming, I found that it wasn't that great for it. The CBE was really unintuitive, there was only framebuffer access to the GPU-RSX chipset, and with just 256MB RAM, $600 would have been better put towards a dual core CPU and any discrete GPU if you wanted a functional Linux computer.
