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Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

And this is what happens when people don't own the hardware they buy. Instead, they get awful DRM'ed bullshit, with a monopolistic store 'owner' digitally forcing whatever they say on their fiefdom.

The first computer I had access to had BASIC built in. Having control of a computer of what runs and not is an absolute basic right of ownership.

And from these computers called "game consoles", you the purchaser have none of that.

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What surprises me is the number of people who seem to be agreeing with Nintendo in this case.

I guess the Overton window is shifting away from a position of software freedom; which is unfortunate. :-/

As other commenters have pointed out, there is actually a BASIC interpreter available from the 3DS store, so interpreters aren't forbidden. And Nintendo has never been to friendly to software use outside what they explicitly allow.

I haven't seen anyone defending Nintendo's use of proprietary platform lock-in, but only that Nintendo should have been notified about it as part of publishing the game.

Well, there's two separate issues at play, and then how they combine.

There's whether you should be able to run your own code on your own device, which I think most people here are on board with.

Then there's whether you should be able to misrepresent what you've agreed to ship through someone's network when you've presumably signed contracts and made statements about that end up being untrue. I think most people would agree that Nintendo should have the ability to control what they allow in their store.

Finally, there's how these interact, because you can only really run stuff on the switch that Nintendo allows in their store, which makes the issue much more complicated.

Which part of the issue someone focuses on will likely inform how their comment is formed, but also how they interpret other people's comments, whether they are really focusing on the same aspect of the issue or not.

My sentiments exactly. To branch a little bit, Nintendo has been historically focused on preventing piracy. It makes sense given their consoles tend to be the easiest to hack of the big 3.

If you remember what happened on the 3DS with Cubic Ninja [0], that game’s level editor allowed the console to run homebrew code. That was inevitably another vector for piracy at a time where Nintendo was already grappling with the for-profit piracy enabler that was Gateway.

Based on this I can’t personally say if Nintendo is against homebrew running on their consoles or if they’re trying their hardest to prevent piracy, at the expense of homebrew. I do think that the feature included in A Dark Room would have had better chances of staying if the dev hadn’t kept it a secret through the publishing process, though.

[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_Ninja#3DS_homebrew_exploit

Nintendo is the video game equivalent of Lincoln Logs. There are people who find freedom in the constraint provided by the lack of configuration possibilities offered by a pile of Lincoln Logs. LEGOs are infinitely more complicated and full of possibilities, but they're going to frustrate the hell out of a Lincoln Log enthusiast.

The difference is that I know that I'm not buying a general purpose computer when I buy a console.

And I'm perfectly fine with that. It's an entertainment device. I have plenty of things that I can run my code on.

I'm pretty sure even RMS would agree, a game console is a single purpose device not unlike a toaster oven.

I doubt it. To quote RMS:

> As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think the user need not take cognizance of whether the device contains a processor and software, or is built some other way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that means installing different software is a normal part of use, so it is a computer.

The Switch does have an "update firmware" function, in addition to being able to install software (games) from the internet or from physical media, so it definitely counts as a computer under this definition.

I agree with you. On the other hand, what if someone wants an awful DRM'ed bullshit? Seems like poor form to purposefully bait-and-switch them. If, say, my Yubikey had some secret dance move that allowed people to read the private key from it, I'd be pretty miffed.

A yubikey is a lot different than a locked down phone or gaming console.

Not on the point of access to personal information- my phone, and I would guess thousands of others, have and use a banking app, have contacts, etc. YubiKeys are similarly not constrained to one use case, and I, too, would be pretty irritated if someone bypassed my laptop's encryption by pressing tilde.

That's not to say that jailbreaking, or any other gaining of execution is inherently bad, it just depends on the use-case- as a teenager, programming on a Switch sounds great, while as a parent, the possibility of my kid gaining access to unlimited blood and gore, Konami code style, might turn me off the platform.

People do own it, and when we bought the hardware, we were sold a game console that plays games specifically designed for it.

That's it.

If you expected more, you've been lied to. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, exactly what it was sold to do, and it does this very well.

If you want development hardware, then buy development hardware. There's no shortage of it; it's everywhere. Go nuts.

If you buy commercial hardware meant for use by end users, made by a company that fights hard against piracy, you get hardware that is anywhere between "annoyingly difficult" all the way to "virtually impossible" to use in your own way. This should not come as a surprise.

The Switch is sold as a game console, and nothing more. Certainly not a development platform. If you can squeeze a development platform out of an off-the-shelf Switch, you are lucky. If you can't, then you got exactly what you were sold, and you have (in my eyes) very little room to complain about the lack of development capability. You knew what you were buying when you bought it.

> People do own it, and when we bought the hardware, we were sold a game console that plays games specifically designed for it. That's it.

If that was true, that would be fine.

But that's not it. It also has restrictive digital signatures that prevent you from running games designed for it.

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