DS Flash Carts Deemed Legal By French Court 267
Hatta writes with a snippet from MaxConsole: "Nintendo has today lost a major court case against the Divineo group in the main court of Paris. Nintendo originally took the group to court over DS flash carts, however the judge today has ruled against Nintendo and suggested that they are purposely locking out developers from their consoles and things should be more like Windows where ANYONE can develop any application if they wish to."
Excellent. (Score:4, Interesting)
Copy Apple & Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe its time that Nintendo opened up the market to game developers such as those currently targeting the iPhone and the Android platforms. Yes they will loose profits, especially when the DS is still working so well, but maybe forcing them to open up will encourage more innovation?
Re:Copy Apple & Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Windows as the standard? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's stopping Nintendo from crippling hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
They're legal, as are modchips in some other countries, but it doesn't stop Nintendo or anyone else from deploying updates that cripple hardware that legally has modchips or whatever. This law isn't really a solution unless it compels Nintendo or any other console manufacturers from treating customers with modchips or whatever differently.
Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
If this is done against the wishes of the console-maker, than you can claim, that they are "winning" too. However unreasonable their wishes may be, they ought to be respected, period. They created the product, they licensed their use to others (of whom nobody was unduly coerced into agreeing) on certain conditions.
You — or this judge — then coming around and saying, you know, we think, those conditions should be changed, and we are going to force you to change them, is just not how things ought to be done in a free society.
Interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Windows as the standard? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. MS doesn't really lock down Windows at least from most people's way of thinking. The only ways it is "locked down" are:
1) The source isn't available to anyone who wants it. Contrary to Slashdot beliefs, it isn't a huge secret. There are organizations like governments, universities, and such that have copies of it. However any person who wants it can't get access to it.
2) They want you to pay for every copy. You are not legally allowed to distribute it to anyone you wish, each copy of it needs to be paid for.
That is really it. Development is unrestricted. They have documentation available on how to do whatever you'd like. They also don't bind it to any given hardware or function. While there are some limits imposed by the basic design (like you need to run on an x86, x64 or IA64 processor) they have the resources for you to develop drivers for the platform of your choice.
They really don't limit you much at all, at least not from a normal user's perspective. No, they don't give you the source but if you aren't a programmer, and most people aren't then it doesn't matter at all.
Also, as a practical matter, I find many people who whine about open source really just want to not pay for software, but won't admit that is their main motivation easily.
Re:Excellent. (Score:3, Interesting)
A 100:1 ratio of junk to gold with 100 games on the market is a far different environment than a 100:1 ratio of junk to gold with 1,000,000 games on the market. In the first case there's only 1 good game out there, in the second there's 1000. Same ratio, far different result. All you need is the ability to ferret out those gold game from the junk, which is entirely possible, and then the more games on the market (with the same or better ratio) the better.