"The battle with hackers and homebrew designers has been especially gruesome with PlayStation Portable because piracy came up so quick and because the standard access systems can make things easy to crack. Yet even Phil Harrison said in a recent interview with Newsweek that he admires the good work that's been done in the underground scene despite the bad that's also been done. And interestingly enough, Sony Computer Entertainment has in the past been able to invite in unlicensed designers with the NetYaroze and Linux projects. Is there any chance that we might see something that allows homebrew programmers to share in the PSP? "

"What Phil said is absolutely correct, we do feel that there is some good that they have done. We some of the value of what they have provided. To answer your question, the value that hackers offer us is that they prompt ideas for possible future updates. We talk about this a lot, but RSS is something that started with the work of a hacker or group of hackers, and looked at the idea that this is something that is wanted, so we did some research on RSS and what can be done with it and what it can offer the larger consumer base, and Japan decided that this was something it wanted to institute.

Going back again, we do listen to all of these PSP communities ... a little bit more indirectly in this case, because it is something that is not authorized from our side, and there's certainly a lot of bad work that has been done -- a lot of PSPs turning into bricks. But if there's something out there that's a good feature that's been created, we're always out there looking at what our users are excited for and want, and so maybe that's something that Japan might end up looking into for the future of the system on the firmware side."

See the whole article at IGN: PSP In The "Game 3.0" Era!

__________________