Recently, Sony announced that update 3.21 (being released on Thursday 1 April) to the Playstation 3 would remove the “Other OS” option – which means that not only would it become impossible to install Linux on the Playstation 3, but any installation will be inaccessible. According to Sony, this is to make the gaming console more reliable.
When the Playstation 3 was introduced, the company Terra Soft Solutions released Yellow Dog Linux for the PS3 and sold PS3 consoles with Yellow Dog pre-installed – including PS3 clusters. Groups at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (with the Playstation 3 Gravity Grid), the University of California Berkeley, and North Carolina State University have all been using PS3 clusters to do computing. Sony Entertainment Spain assisted the Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics Lab in Barcelona, Spain, to create the PS3Grid (now rebranded GPUGrid).
As recently as January 2010, the United States Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, NY, just announced that they are adding 1700 PS3s to go with the 300+ that they already have clustered (called the TeraFLOPS Heterogenous Cluster).
The PS3 was supposed to be an open platform, even supported by Sony. I wonder what happened. I can’t imagine that the USAF will be happy about this, and I can only hope that cluster administrators see this one coming and can stop it – or there will be some dead clusters.
I’ve been waiting for the prices on old PS3s to come down and my budget to go up just to run Linux on it – now the next update is to kill it. Not nice.
I suspect there will be some lawsuits if this update truly comes to pass.
UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a nice expansive writeup on this. One thing that they note is that a hacker recently discovered a way to crack the security on the PS3 hypervisor (using the OtherOS feature and some soldering), permitting full unrestricted access to the entire PS3 hardware environment. Secondly, the article also notes that Sony pulled something like this with the Aibo robot dog some years back.
UNIX Administratosphere 
I totally agree with you. I am still hoping that this is some kind of joke, but alas it does not seem to be. I have a PS3 and yes, at some point I planned on using the feature this summer. I purchased the PS3 because it had gaming, blu-ray and it was a good media tool to hold my data. I am not a happy camper, but I will get over it I guess. Unfortunately I will not trust them ever again (not to say Microsoft is any better). I think its time to just build a PC.
Thank You for the Great information. 😀