I'll preface this by saying I'm a Ouya Kickstarter backer - Limited Edition no less. However, I am VERY worried about the future of what I thought I was backing. I make my general disgust for "Consoles" - proprietary, crippled computers you pay for but don't own because you want to play the games that are often exclusively held hostage upon them - well known. After what I've seen this generation with X360/PS3/3DS/Vita etc, I'd be happy if the concept of a console could simply die out. However, I backed Ouya because it proposed something different - an open system, equally available for the living room console "push button, box work" type and the technophile modder and hacker.
Their rhetoric spoke of the fact that you had access to the hardware and software, "anyone" could publish etc. Now, I didn't expect everything to be completely open source or without Ouya guiding the contents of their own Ouya Marketplace, but I do expect it to be as open as Android, given that Ouya's software is derived from that very platform. Android is, especially as far as consumer electronics platforms go, wonderfully open. There are plenty of modifications out there as well as forks and hacks given its (mostly, there are still some issues of course) open source nature. You can use any number of "App marketplace" repositories or none at all, choosing to sideload every .apk you wish. Best of all, this can all be done concurrently on "normal" branches of Android (As opposed to say, the Android-based forks used in KindleOS which is made to encourage the user to purchase exclusively from Amazon's properties etc..).
Go into the settings and turn on the ability to load your own applications manually, and you're free, with all the responsibility and privileges this entails. Does this allow for piracy? Of course it does, and easily so However, even better is that Google (nor many other market providers) does not cripple functionality because you flipped that switch. You don't lose your Google Play or GApps functionality - you're not locked out of the ecosystem because you chose to reach beyond it. Instead, you can share and choose as you like This is the main difference between "Console" platforms and something like Android; and the reason that Android is thriving despite "rampant piracy". To their credit, Google and others involved in Android know that if you lock the door behind them (especially if you take all their fruit at the door!) when they leave your walled garden, they will never have reason to return. Thus, a simple gate system is much better, allowing users to come and go as they please without punishing them for looking beyond the walls in the first place. They will continue to have the chance to buy that would never be possible if they were booted out the first time they peeked outside. Combined with (generally) smart pricing, FOSS multiplatform tools, and cheap licensing, Android's software community thrives. Except of course, in the minds of bean-counters who fallaciously count up all the pirated or brought-from-elsewhere instances they can find and assume they are somehow real losses, driving them into a frenzy.
What does this all have to do with Ouya? Well, as it turns out, quite a bit. I backed Ouya with them championing "Open" everywhere, thinking that between their apparent love of "openness" and the Android platform from which they were building, that their system would at least be as open as I describe above. For a console, it is a radical concept I want to support - users being able to maintain their Ouya handle, buy from the store, play online with others etc...even if they "hack around" (not in-game cheats of course or anything detrimental to other's enjoyment. I'm talking about say... Undubs of game content, XBMC/MythTV builds, other tools and game mods, homebrews, etc..) and load in content from other sources; it would happily live besides Ouya purchased content in the same ecosystem - with the "This is not an official Ouya vetted application" warnings necessary, of course. Bringing the "Android Marketplace Coexistence" approach to consoles is truly something I wish to support, and would be the revolution that Ouya was talking about. Unfortunately, I'm worried that won't be so.
Awhile ago, there was some Tweet released that basically "clarified" that their plan wasn't Android-style openness, but "You can root the device so you hackers can install something else on the hardware, but it will be a completely different partition of sorts that won't interact with any official Ouya ecosystems". This isn't bloody revolutionary - this is just PS3's OtherOS again. If I wanted to buy a small box filled with Android-compliant hardware, so I could install Android upon it, I could build one myself right now. I don't want to see Ouya to be another XboxLive/PSN where you're either forced to pay-to-play exclusively by their rules, at their table, with their toys, or you're out. Just creating that kind of system atop commodity hardware isn't revolutionary nor desirable. In courting all these major developers, it appears that Ouya is willing to fall into the industry panic over piracy and erase its biggest draw. The good thing is thankfully we have some time to hopefully change some minds
I urge anyone else who was looking forward to Ouya at least being as open as Android, with full coexistence between official Ouya content and 3rd party content from elsewhere, to contact them with your concerns. Otherwise, we might be getting an Android boxed locked exclusively to a single "marketplace"; less valuable than Android itself. That is not the ideal I paid to back.
Their rhetoric spoke of the fact that you had access to the hardware and software, "anyone" could publish etc. Now, I didn't expect everything to be completely open source or without Ouya guiding the contents of their own Ouya Marketplace, but I do expect it to be as open as Android, given that Ouya's software is derived from that very platform. Android is, especially as far as consumer electronics platforms go, wonderfully open. There are plenty of modifications out there as well as forks and hacks given its (mostly, there are still some issues of course) open source nature. You can use any number of "App marketplace" repositories or none at all, choosing to sideload every .apk you wish. Best of all, this can all be done concurrently on "normal" branches of Android (As opposed to say, the Android-based forks used in KindleOS which is made to encourage the user to purchase exclusively from Amazon's properties etc..).
Go into the settings and turn on the ability to load your own applications manually, and you're free, with all the responsibility and privileges this entails. Does this allow for piracy? Of course it does, and easily so However, even better is that Google (nor many other market providers) does not cripple functionality because you flipped that switch. You don't lose your Google Play or GApps functionality - you're not locked out of the ecosystem because you chose to reach beyond it. Instead, you can share and choose as you like This is the main difference between "Console" platforms and something like Android; and the reason that Android is thriving despite "rampant piracy". To their credit, Google and others involved in Android know that if you lock the door behind them (especially if you take all their fruit at the door!) when they leave your walled garden, they will never have reason to return. Thus, a simple gate system is much better, allowing users to come and go as they please without punishing them for looking beyond the walls in the first place. They will continue to have the chance to buy that would never be possible if they were booted out the first time they peeked outside. Combined with (generally) smart pricing, FOSS multiplatform tools, and cheap licensing, Android's software community thrives. Except of course, in the minds of bean-counters who fallaciously count up all the pirated or brought-from-elsewhere instances they can find and assume they are somehow real losses, driving them into a frenzy.
What does this all have to do with Ouya? Well, as it turns out, quite a bit. I backed Ouya with them championing "Open" everywhere, thinking that between their apparent love of "openness" and the Android platform from which they were building, that their system would at least be as open as I describe above. For a console, it is a radical concept I want to support - users being able to maintain their Ouya handle, buy from the store, play online with others etc...even if they "hack around" (not in-game cheats of course or anything detrimental to other's enjoyment. I'm talking about say... Undubs of game content, XBMC/MythTV builds, other tools and game mods, homebrews, etc..) and load in content from other sources; it would happily live besides Ouya purchased content in the same ecosystem - with the "This is not an official Ouya vetted application" warnings necessary, of course. Bringing the "Android Marketplace Coexistence" approach to consoles is truly something I wish to support, and would be the revolution that Ouya was talking about. Unfortunately, I'm worried that won't be so.
Awhile ago, there was some Tweet released that basically "clarified" that their plan wasn't Android-style openness, but "You can root the device so you hackers can install something else on the hardware, but it will be a completely different partition of sorts that won't interact with any official Ouya ecosystems". This isn't bloody revolutionary - this is just PS3's OtherOS again. If I wanted to buy a small box filled with Android-compliant hardware, so I could install Android upon it, I could build one myself right now. I don't want to see Ouya to be another XboxLive/PSN where you're either forced to pay-to-play exclusively by their rules, at their table, with their toys, or you're out. Just creating that kind of system atop commodity hardware isn't revolutionary nor desirable. In courting all these major developers, it appears that Ouya is willing to fall into the industry panic over piracy and erase its biggest draw. The good thing is thankfully we have some time to hopefully change some minds
I urge anyone else who was looking forward to Ouya at least being as open as Android, with full coexistence between official Ouya content and 3rd party content from elsewhere, to contact them with your concerns. Otherwise, we might be getting an Android boxed locked exclusively to a single "marketplace"; less valuable than Android itself. That is not the ideal I paid to back.
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