What's more likely is that once Geohot and others started hacking the machine, sometimes through linux. Someone at Sony must have realised that it's an attack vector that a miniscule amount of users used.
And it'd be better for them to get rid of the functionality.
> What's more likely is that once Geohot and others started hacking the machine, sometimes through linux. Someone at Sony must have realised that it's an attack vector that a miniscule amount of users used.
> And it'd be better for them to get rid of the functionality.
On the other hand: The people who love to hack Linux to run on their toaster are often the people who have the knowledge to exploit the device. As long as Linux already ran from beginning on, this kind of people had no real incentive to attack the device to run Linux. As soon as this option was removed, this kind of community got furious on Sony and decided to let their exploits loose.
Sony didn't let OtherOS use the GPU proper (it only let you use a basic frame buffer) so there was already incentive to attack the device to expose more capabilities.
The PS3 supported installing Linux onto it and there were people internally supporting it.
Yellow Dog Linux was the officialish distro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux
What's more likely is that once Geohot and others started hacking the machine, sometimes through linux. Someone at Sony must have realised that it's an attack vector that a miniscule amount of users used.
And it'd be better for them to get rid of the functionality.