blu said:
what benefit do free software developers get from writing for the pc?
what benefit do homebrew developers get from writing for the psp? for the dreamcast? for the ds?
writing original, free software for a very popular platform - that's the benefit.
PC is an open platform. PSP and DS are both portable devices. Dreamcast was considerably more high-end than Wii upon its release and also would boot directly from CD-R media without modification. None of these are comparable to Wii in a sense that would support your answer.
However, I suppose my question should have been, what benefit does the ability to run arbitrary code on the Wii provide to a homebrew developer that isn't grossly exceeded by the benefits already provided by developing on other platforms?
If you want to develop for the remote, you already can on PC. In fact, I will go so far as to say that homebrew development for the remote will always be more advanced on the PC platform than on the Wii. Without Nintendo's SDKs everything needs to be created from scratch - hobbyist developers have already gotten started with this on the PC side - on the Wii hardware side it will always be catching up and mooching from the PC work.
Any project that doesn't use the remote will work better and get a bigger audience on PC or even something like OG Xbox.
Of course people are doing their best to open the platform, "Because it's there". But opening the Wii won't really provide any new benefits to hobbyist developers. It won't add anything at all to development for the control interface and there are already better small form factor computing devices to develop for.
Keep in mind that the fact that closed Wiis are popular doesn't have much bearing on this - only the number of Wiis used as open systems by their end users matters.