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