Sony has been in the news a lot recently, mostly due to the various hacking attempts against various divisions and groups within the company. The most notable of these hacks is easily the hacking of the PlayStation Network that led to the potential leak of 77 million customer"s details.
Many people attributed these attacks to disgruntled hackers who were upset at Sony"s handling of the whole PS3 jailbreaking scene - namely, Sony sued anyone and everyone they could that had anything to do with it, the most notable being George Hotz. While there are many good reasons for Sony to want to protect their investments, a case has been made to Sony that had they allowed enthusiasts some way of installing homebrew (Or not removing Linux support), the whole thing may never have happened.
Today, that case is still being made and a notable hacker called Youness Alaoui, better known as KaKaRoToKS, is making it by releasing a collection of 33 Homebrew games for jailbroken PS3s. Youness is a major supporter of Open Source software and one of the primary developers for aMSN, a popular open source clone of Microsoft"s MSN messenger.
The Humble Homebrew Bundle is similar to the extremely popular Humble Indie Bundle, however there is absolutely no relation between the two. The games are also released for free but you can donate if you like as well.
However, the purpose of the bundle is to grab Sony"s attention - many people still want to be able to legitimately run homebrew applications on their PS3s and the site has a petition people can opt to sign (no donation necessary) if they feel the same way.
The Humble Homebrew Collection is an initiative that aims to convince Sony to provide us with a legitimate and official way to create homebrew applications for the consoles that we own.
We are providing you with a free homebrew game that aims to be polished and look professionally made which includes 33 very good and addictive puzzle games. We"ve tried to make this homebrew games collection as good as possible so that even the anti-homebrew purists will be jealous of it.
Homebrew does not equal piracy, and this is proof of it. These games are all free and are released under the MIT license.
The games are also available on other platforms, namely Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Android.
The debate for and against homebrew is certainly a hot one. Most people would agree that running unlicensed software can lead to fantastic creations, like the popular XBMC which was originally a piece of homebrew for hacked Xboxes. The problem, however, is that the ability to use homebrew can often lead to piracy and cheating in online games, which most people (particularly platform holders like Sony) don"t want. The real aim of the Humble Homebrew Bundle is to show that piracy and homebrew are not one and the same and that if Sony offered a legitimate, controlled way to use homebrew, then there would be less interest in hacking the PS3.
At the very least, even if you don"t own a PS3 or care not for the cause of the homebrew bundle, there"s still a pretty sweet collection of games up for grabs, for free, so feel free to head over and give them a shot yourself.