En effet, si les studios de développement ont besoin d'une licence pour concevoir des produits pour la PS3, Izumi Kawanishi a affirmé que les développeurs amateurs ne seraient soumis à aucune contrainte de ce type et pourraient donner libre cours à leur créativité. Sony verrouillera vraisemblablement son système pour éviter que d'ingénieux développeurs ne mettent au point des méthodes pour lire des jeux piratés, mais le japonais ne devrait pas interdire la mise au point d'utilitaires (les fameux homebrew, interdits par Sony, qui ont contribué au succès de la PSP), de jeux, d'adaptations pour utiliser sur PS3 des applications issues de l'univers PC. En revanche, rien ne garantit que les amateurs auront accès aux outils de développement, SDK (Software Development Kit) et autres compilateurs, contrairement aux studios de développement sous licence.
Toutefois, il est impossible à l'heure actuelle de savoir si Sony optera pour une distribution Linux existante ou s'il développera la sienne.

Base platform support for Linux on the Cell has been established and is currently on its way into the mainstream Linux kernel tree. Read about the Cell's unique architecture and the SPU file system interface that allows Linux to run on it.
The Cell processor from Sony, Toshiba, and IBM® is this year's most awaited newcomer on the CPU market. It promises unprecedented performance in the consumer and workstation market by employing a radically new architecture. Built around a 64-bit PowerPC® core, multiple independent vector processors called Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) are combined on a single microprocessor.
Unlike existing SMP systems or multicore implementations of other processors, on the Cell, only the general purpose PowerPC core is able to run a generic operating system, while the SPUs are specialized to run computational tasks. Porting Linux™ to run on Cell's PowerPC core is a relatively easy task because of the similarities to existing platforms like IBM pSeries® or Apple Power Macintosh, but this does not give access to the enormous computing power of the SPUs.
Only the kernel can directly communicate with an SPU and therefore needs to abstract the hardware interface into system calls or device drivers. The most important functions of the user interface include loading a program binary into an SPU, transferring memory between an SPU program and a Linux userspace application, and synchronizing the execution. Other challenges are the integration of SPU program execution into existing tools like GDB or OProfile.
A joint team of Sony, IBM, and Toshiba employees based in Austin, Texas, did the groundwork for the Linux kernel port. The current set of kernel patches is based on the latest 2.6.xx snapshot kernel and is maintained by the IBM LTC (Linux Technology Center) team in Böblingen, Germany. The team hopes to integrate most of this into the 2.6.13 kernel release so it will become part of upcoming distribution releases.
With the current state of Linux on Cell, you can write special-purpose applications running on the prototype board while using the full performance of the chip. While most applications do not immediately run better on Cell, there is a lot of potential to port performance-critical applications to use library code running on an SPU for better performance.
The base platform support is currently making its way into the mainline Linux kernel, and the SPU file system interface is on its way to being stabilized enough to be included in upcoming releases of the kernel and of major distributions.
Possibles premiéres applications optimisées pour le Cell :
3D :
-Mental Ray
-Maya
-3ds Max
-Softimage
Vidéo :
-Mplayer/xine
-x264
-VLC
-Handbrake
-PSPVideo9
*En construction*
