I can motivate my support for geohot, I'd like to hear their reasons (besides all the FUD spread everywhere by sony & friends).

I thought that hackers and playstation 3 "owners" would be on the same side, given that the ultimate question here is whether they really own the console or not.

I am not sure reasoned justification comes into it. It's football with words and you have to root for your team.

and, unfortunately, it is also "more fun" to root for the "winning team", so when there are shifts in the balance of power you see shifts in the demographics of agreement. :(

My guess is that among video game enthusiasts, "hacking" is linked to cheating in online gameplay, which I think we can all agree is really annoying.

It also depends on what motivations you assign to geohot. I wouldn't have much sympathy for him if I thought his intention was to pirate video games.

Actually, given the ps3-owning demographic, the widespread impression that geohot was trying to enable piracy may actually have increased support for him. Gamers are a notoriously piratey bunch, so if the story had been "George Hotz wants you to be able to play games from bittorrent", he might have enjoyed wider support.

Most PS3 owners care about playing games, watching DVDs, maybe playing some streaming media, etc. As long as those things work, they'll have no interest in who actually controls the machine. They'll certainly have no interest in hacking the guts of the console to turn it into a flaky general purpose computer. There's a good chance they already have plenty of those around. And since they get no utility from the hacks but do pay some costs, it seems perfectly rational to pick the "wrong" side from your perspective.

Which isn't to say that Sony has handled this well: they're still incompetent and Evil.

It's likely the perception that geohotz hacks have something to do with 'cheaters'.

Given the choice between paying $X for a console that comes with restrictions so that you can only use it for playing games, or paying $Y for a console that you can do anything you want with, where $Y is greater than $X by up to a couple hundred dollars, most PS3 buyers would take the former.

I can see how people might worry that if using PS3s for non-gaming becomes widespread, Sony might feel the need to raise the price to make up for the loss.

> I thought that hackers and playstation 3 "owners" would be on the same side

Apparently, Anonymous took down the PSN for some time in protest to the litigation. I'm sure that galvanized the viewpoint of some Playstation users who may not have even been aware of the bigger picture.

I think its also the stigma attached to the word hacker. geohot may have had more support from the owners if he had called himself a freedom fighter..