Valve's Newell Thinks PS3 Needs To Be "Open Like a Mac"

Eraesr writes "Apparently Valve boss Gabe Newell thinks the PS3 needs to be more of an open platform, drawing a comparison to Apple's Mac platform. In an interview with 5BY5.TV, he said he would like to see the PS3 be 'open like a Mac' instead of being 'more closed like a Gamecube.' 'Platform investments, like the Mac, are difficult because you have to be aware of what direction that platform is moving,' Newell said, referring to the firm's recent move onto Macs with its titles and distribution service Steam. 'We need to target platforms that do a better job of looking like where we want to be in a few years.'"

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and enough to make parts of it refuse to work right, regardless of one's prior UNIX knowledge. I'll never forgive them for the "Internet Sharing" setting, which regularly fails even between a pair of Macs...then when you start trying to troubleshoot it you find that while natd is running, there's no natd.conf ...those bastards have wrapped it up in some proprietary binary object. Thanks Apple; you've successfully reinvented the wheel, and made it square to boot.

Re:His assesment is accurate...

[dingen]

In all fairness, a Linux client of Steam is on its way.

Re:His assesment is accurate...

[Ixokai]

How do you get to this? How conceivably is OSX more closed then Windows?

Its extensively documented, the full suite of development tools needed to make software on it are provided for free by the vendor, and its *really* cheap to get beta/pre-releases to test against -- seriously, have you *seen* a MSDN license, vs the $99 Apple charges? (Yes, I'm aware of the Express editions MS has been offering)

Yes, the iPhone OS is closed as all hell. Mac != iPhone, even though they share a lot in common.

As a *platform*, the Mac is pretty open. Open as in there are very little barriers for entry for developers. Anyone can write software it, there's no licensing you need to get your software on it, all the tools are available to anyone, with everything documented well.

Windows, by comparison, is more open then iPhone OS, certainly... and of late its documentation is pretty good. But for the fully enabled toolchain and documentation set and access to beta-versions and everything is hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Re:Like a Mac. A Big Mac?

[jd2112]

The Big Mac may be the worlds first open source burger. For those of you not old enough to remember, their slogan used to be "Two all beef patties, special sauce(*), lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun" which can be considered the "source code" of the burger. (*) since they never revealed the source to the special sauce the code cannot completely compile as published

Re:Yeah

[dgatwood]

What, like that obscure filesystem, what's it's name, that no one uses? Oh, right, NTFS.

NTFS, which dates back to the early 1990s, is hardly a modern filesystem. It is also a case-sensitive filesystem under the hood. This is masked by a case-insensitivity shim for applications accessing it through the Win32 API, but applications that use lower-level APIs get case-sensitive behavior. So I'll see your NTFS and raise you basically every single filesystem created in the past two decades.

Case-sensitivity in a filesystem is not something a developer should have to care about, any more than they should have to care about, oh, I don't know, a lack of protected memory. Sure, it would be nice if people used correct cases, but really, it's 2010.

Exactly. It's 2010. If twenty years of every single new filesystem being case-sensitive hasn't gotten people to realize that this is the direction technology is moving, I don't know what will....