Well, this bit of news will surely excite all the PS3 fans. Kawanishi, Network system development manager at SCE, revealed at E3 in an interview that the PS3 will be supporting Linux! Although it has been known before, this interview just confirms the fact.

English Translation:
The PS3 will come standard with a functional Linux Operating System as well as compilers and other tools. This will give a vast playground to all the programmers on the PS3. This means that the PS3 will support all USB drives. Even back in the PlayStation generation, there were a lot of creations by homebrew developers. On the PS3, this will be much more.

If you think of the PS3 as an ecosystem, the game studios will still follow the current routine, to treat the PS3 as a game console, and develop games while paying the license fee. However, in which form can the individual developers participate best in the software development for the PS3?

"To request license fee from the individual developers is a little hard (laughing). When a game studio buys a license to develop for the PS3, SCE side must supply the studio with necessary tools and SDK libraries, as well as all kinds of technical support. Since the PS3 is using Linux, the license fee will not be required for developing on it."

Won't this be a challenge to all the programmers since they won't have any knowledge technical knowledge of the hardware?

"Based on Linux, it is the OS-side hardware layer which is managing the Cell processor related issues, which makes the SPE also opened to the developers. However, I don't think that the PS3 as a game platform business, and the PS3 in the Linux world, will be merged into one."

So, what does this mean for the average PS3 user who doesn't understand jack about Linux? Well, for starters, this is as good as an official announcement that Sony and PS3 will not block homebrew in any way, unlike the PSP. And the fact that homebrew developers will be welcomed with open arms and not boxing gloves, like on the PSP.

Seeing the PSP community, it's quite obvious that Sony would've learned a lot. A lot of homebrew on the PSP is stuff which Sony should have taken care of in the first place. And if they couldn't, they shouldn't have blocked it.

I'll skip the "Linux for Dummies" explanation. I assume all of our readers have at least heard of it sometime in their lives. And many of you must've tried it too. Linux on any platform is a dream. You can do so much with it. For programmers, this means that they won't have to code on the PC and transfer to the PS3. For the average user, Linux will open a world unimaginable before. Almost everything you can do on a PC, you will be able to do here. Media Centers (MythTV anyone?), Cool Desktop environments (KDE, Gnome), Browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Opera), and lots more.

I just hope that they don't tie it down and cripple it. The PS2 Linux 'project' wasn't as successful because of the same reason.

No other details were revealed. So we still don't know if they will be using a popular distro or make one of their own (possibly deriving from another distro?). Plus, we don't know if the PS3's actual OS will be Linux itself, or whether it will be a dualboot environment. I'd guess that it's the latter.

Using Linux as the PS3's OS would mean a lot of headaches for them, as well as the GNU/GPL guys. Plus, using Linux as the main OS would mean possibly crippling it, so that it doesn't run code which they don't want. I'd rather not get into speculation mode, seeing how big companies have a knack of letting us down.

This bit of news finally brings something positive from the PS3 side on the table. Sony had been getting a lot of flak lately. Hopefully, this bit of news will help the PS3 redeem itself.

Click here to read the original interview (In Japanese)

I'd like to thank our resident blogger and translator, Jeff Chen, for translating the relevant part. I owe you one man :)