why?
I thought this was clear.
Sony get royaties from game titles and the machines are sold at almost a loss.
If you can run unsigned code = you can pirate easily.
If that is so, = no profit for Sony.
Of course, poor linuxheads lose out because of this. I bought a PS3 to mess with the cell not play games. Nor to pirate - I wouldn't buy 99.9% of ps3 games on offer at present, nor play them if given them free, nor would I want them.
But you see, they force us to run in a hypervisor so we can't get at the multimedia hardware and write our own free or otherwise games in which Sony doesn't have a piece of the pie.
So now while I can cruch numbers pretty fast on the cell, my display is a dog.
(One argument for the hypervisor is that it makes it easier to port the linux kernel to the PS3 but I am not buying that argument completely, what they really want to do is lock out the multimedia hardware ie Nvidia rsx chip - everytime there was a glimmer we could get at it they closed the gaps)
So, I hope this guy really has done what he has done and spreads the knowledge around and it's easy to do and hard to circumvent and we have a kernel soon that boots on bare metal. I think this will mean a drastic change to the kernel/drivers as some devices currently abstracted will look totally different without the hypervisor but it is not an unsurmountable problem.
Just get us a means of running unsigned code. I may not be able to tackle a kernel/driver rewrite on my own but together.... we can.