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Ballmer baulks at Oz Xbox chippers charter

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27723.html

By John Lettice

Posted: 22/10/2002 at 10:05 GMT

Microsoft's efforts so far to obstruct Xbox mod chips have been relatively trivial, and simple for the modders to circumvent. The most recent redesign, for example, was dealt with inside a week. But on his recent Australian adventure Microsoft president Steve Ballmer dispensed one of the clearest policy statements on Xbox so far - Microsoft intends Xbox to be a closed system and to stay that way, and will use both technical and legal avenues to protect it.

[...]

Linux? No, no matter how heroic the team from the Xbox Linux Project is, Microsoft is not going to lose huge swathes of revenue because all the purchasers run Linux instead and don't buy any games. Its Xbox software licensing regime will be disrupted (as is the case already for many players in the entertainment business) if it becomes less possible or impossible to divvy up licences by territory and police it via regionalisation, but one does wonder why the law should have to shore up something as daft and artificial as regionalisation. [...]

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