Podboy:

One does not have to reveal all with OSS, contrary to popular belief, only all that is tightly bound together. In particular, one does not have the reveal the bits of the "operating system" on which the free code runs. There is plenty of room to reveal some, but not all, and retain a competetive advantage.

Roku does not, for example, disclose how to defeat Macrovision or CSS. They can't for contractual reasons related to licencing these techologies. And they don't have to.

Of course, any tinkering voids the warranty. The point that you miss is that while .1% might tinker, 50, 70, or 99.9% of the user base might find the hack useful, and this increases the value of the base unit to them. Nothing stops Outlaw from taking a free hack, selling it at a price, to provide a hacker-provided feature with the benefit that the user does not void their warranty applying it (because Outlaw "approved" it). More likely, they'd include it for free in the next release of the firmware on the basis that the additional features will attract more customers.

The 990 has a USB port. Audio and (in maintenance mode) software can be downloaded to it. How hard would it be to send OSD information from a PC to the 990 via USB, such as Caller ID information gleaned from a modem when the phone rings? What about local weather updates? These are the kinds of possibilities that opening the unit up to hackers offers.

The device is huge (mostly because of the daughter board architecture). How hard would it be to include a mini-ITX board, and possibly hard drive, to turn it into an integrated MythTV box/pre/pro? That would be an ideal marriage of front end software and backend firmware/hardware, with the "restricted bits" (i.e. DD decoding, etc.) kept separate from the open bits? Heck, one could likely do it with little info about the 990 since it could all be done via IR control and hooking up a few signal lines internally instead of externally. (Outlaw: a daughter board accepting internal spdif and video connections would be nice!)


At this point, I'd simply like to see a top-level architectural diagram of the data and signal flow within the 990. It would clear up a lot of the errors and ambiguities in the manual.

I'm not suggesting that (to use the auto analogy) Ford provide engineering drawings for their engines. I'm just saying that good things can happen all around if the hood is not welded shut.

The people who hack consumer hardware know full well that they've voided their warranty.