Sony actually officially supported it at the time... and then realized that since PS3 was sold at a massive loss, selling thousands of units to bulk customers who would never buy any games was costing them millions.
Subsequent consoles dropped the "sell the hardware at a loss, make it up on games" model, they only lose money during a brief window at launch and then economies of scale take over and most of the console life it's profitable. It's likely that other kinds of hardware also share this model but we just don't hear about it - steam deck is running tight margins and day-1 sales are more expensive than the "average" unit sold mid-gen or late-gen, so similarly they are probably selling day-1 units at a loss even if they make a profit on the expected cost.
Of course... even though sony is selling the hardware at a profit, they still maintain the lock-in, just like apple/etc. The linux feature never came back even though the reason for the removal went away.
> I believe they had to jailbreak these to get Linux installed on them.
OtherOS was a fully supported feature on the PS3, that enabled you to install Linux on a secondary partition on the built in HDD. At least until George Hotz used it to get hypervisor access and exploit the PS3.
This lead to the feature being removed and him being sued by Sony.
Nope. PS3s were initially released with a built-in feature to install other OSes. This Air Force project got a ton of publicity. It directly led to Sony deciding to lock down the hardware and firmware on future releases.
Just imagining an Air Force employee (?) browsing community modding forums and such for older firmware and tools, kinda funny.