and a user buys a license for that software then the license can stipulate that certain hardware should be used.

As long as you are upfront that is a restriction, it really is no one else's business.

I am rooting for Apple here, even though I will probably never buy one of their machines. It really is a cheek of another company to think they can just leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks, why don't they just fund and write an operating system themselves.

Oh, I know why because it would increase their costs, funny that, that's why software writing is a business not a good damn free for all, it takes money, vision and knowledge to produce software, I don't know why others feel that they can just come along and rip it off, changing the license terms to benefit their business model, and expect to get away with it.

I think this illustrates a key philosophical difference between those who believe interface design doesn't end at the pretty pixels, but should be created holistically as a seamless integration between hardware and software; and those like Microsoft who believe that merely having some swishy translucent windows is "good enough for the punters, but please stop whining about your hardware issues as if that's even remotely our problem."

Shamefully, most of the FOSS crowd seem to be on Microsoft's side on this issue.

Nobody complains that they can't install Linux on their Indesit washing machine, so why should they care what their desktop or notebook computer runs?

If Psystar really wanted to make something worthwhile, why didn't they just install a Linux distro instead? It's not as if this approach hasn't worked for Elonex or Asus.

Where are they selling them *from*? I'd halfway consider getting one at this point depending on the available options and such because it's going to be either (1) Cheaper than a Mac or (2) become a great collectable item after all this is over with.

Hmm, funny. I remember your earlier post, when you were cursing the iPhone for the lock-in, and you argued that you can do with your iPhone, legally yours, whatever you liked and shove in any SIM-card of your liking.

Why is it, that when I buy a license for software, I am not allowed to run it on compatible hardware? - at least according to your esteemed opinion. Do you not contradict yourself here?

Well they didn't change the licence, but don't try to claim apple wrote OSX. They have slapped a proprietary front end on a BSD backend. Hardly the height of originality that. If they don't want their OS on any machines but theirs - don't f*king sell it in a box !

I'm rooting for Apple to win this case because that means I'll see less MacOS.

Apple doesn't look like being quite that holistic lately, what with many instances of its hardware seemingly at odds with its own OS.

(Anyway, looking forward to going Macspire, Eeekintosh or Makoya ASAP, myself :D )

AC comment 1said "If I write the software "

" am rooting for Apple here, even though I will probably never buy one of their machines. It really is a cheek of another company to think they can just leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks, why don't they just fund and write an operating system themselves."

may i remind you that infact the software licence had been payed to the software maker.

also did you forget the origins of the MS PC hardware "IBM-PC" ring any bells, your a hardware pirate "leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks" ;)

The software is available for sale and you can use it as long as you agree to terms x, y, z. One issue is whether you agreed to those terms by installing the software and the other issue is whether those terms are fair.

If you don't think the terms are fair, you challenge them. You do not challenge them by ignoring the terms and make a profit as a result.

Challenge first, then profit once you've won. You can't do it the other way around.

"and a user buys a license for that software then the license can stipulate that certain hardware should be used."

Well, thats pretty much playing right into the RIAAss' plans isn't it? You've stated the "legal" basis for the *stupid* system of 'zoning' for DVDs, music, software, biscuits, watching overseas TV shows before they are played in your country, etc.

Thanks.

Now, HAND BACK YOUR OUT-OF-REGION DVDs, CDs, BOOKS BOUGHT THROUGH 'GREY' CHANNELS (ie Amazon) (in best 'Halt! Kommen sie hier! accent.) (actually, what is Merkin for that? - "Spread 'em, you commie swarthy towel-head terrrrrst!")

An interesting philosophical (and soon to be legal) question: where is the line between hardware and software? If, for example, Apple sold a keyboard with a license that it were only to be used on Mac's, the chances are extremely high that they'd lose attempts to enforce that: once purchased, you can use it as a doorstop (a good purpose for an Apple keyboard, IMO) if you like.

But that keyboard contains (a lot of) hardware and (a little) software. Change things around so you're buying a little hardware (a disk) and a lot of software (an OS). Most people seem to feel that's a different case, and restrictions on use are not inappropriate.

So where's the line?

Of course, what this really all about is Apple trying to have their cake and eat it to: they could have stated that you can only get Mac OS with a Mac (one free copy with every computer), and then sold upgrades that required a registered piece of hardware before they'd work (activated over one's iPhone, probably!). That's hardly complicated. But they wanted, instead, to sell the software as if it were a commodity product, and now someone is challenging their posturing: if they will sell me a copy without caring if I have a Mac (and they will), and they don't care if I just leave it on a shelf (and they don't), how can they suddenly care if I do something else with it?

While I have no great interest either way in the outcome of this particular squabble, I am eager to see fail these sorts of legalistic attempts to enforce unnatural restrictions. To me, this is like the DMCA: using the law to restrict usage because you're too lazy to use technology is culturally troubling.

All you lazy wipes like Psystar who can't create anything your own, should pile on for free via some government cheat-sheet (Sherman Anti Trust), steal some songs and copy a few dvd's while you're at it.... That is until some twelve year old who took the time to achieve something on their own, brings on something that sucks you all dry. Creeps.

BTW, how does it smell under the shade of someone else's ass?

Toadsticker

"a user buys a license for that software then the license can stipulate that certain hardware should be used.

As long as you are upfront that is a restriction, it really is no one else's business."

I licence is not a way to write your own laws, over riding real laws you don't like.

Ford can't make you buy oil and tires from the dealer.

Just because they say they didn't sell you the software, only licensed it, is no reason to think they can do what ever the hell they want.

I always remain astounded at the misunderstood nature of the history and technical nature of OSX.

The underpinning OS is not BSD, it is Mach - which includes some BSD functionality in an emulation layer. Apple's previous chief scientist, Avidas Trevanian wrote a very large part of Mach as part of his PhD thesis whilst at CMU. (Ironically, his thesis advisor - Rick Rashid went to work at Redmond.) Avie worked with Steve Jobs at Next, and they brought the OS with them when they took over Apple. The software that is protected is the layered components that sit on top of Mach and the BSD emulation. A lot of this derives from Nextstep.

Perhaps the most telling thing is that the underpinning OS is not what is in dispute - it is now called Darwin and is open source. That whole Mach kernel, BSD layer, and tools - are all available free. The functionality provided is pretty much early 1980's Unix. "Slapping a proprietary front end" is rather underestimating the size of the task.

Apple have a trivial and simple answer to the licensing issue for OSX. They only sell a license with the hardware. All other purchases of the software are for upgrades. No original license, no right to apply the upgrade. In essence this is already the case. Technically the install disk contains a complete image and can be installed on a clean disk. But ownership of the hardware is the right to use token, in much the same way as some software requires a hardware dongle to operate. In essence

By the looks of the photo, it's a bog standard assembled PC with a nice (but not too sexy) case that a lot of other companies make out of their garages and PC repair workshops, and just as some of the Linux friendly guys go out of their way to select hardware known to work with their favorite distro, Psystar have done the same for PC hardware known to work with probably an EFS bootloader and with MacOS drivers.

Remember that this is not difficult as Mac's are now glorified PC's.

Now, Psystar sell an assembled PC. They can install Linux on it. They can install WinXP on it, they could install any other PC hardware compatible operating system on it, and they chose MacOS. Why not: Apple sell the OS retail on the shelves, and you should be able to do what the hell ever you want with it as long as you do not crack off illegal copies, but an extra limtation is the licence saying that you must not install this on non apple hardware or you will go to hell (or somthing along these lines) - meaning that they are enforcing via licence a hardware lock-in to preserve a monopoly.

OK, the licence says that you must not do this and that distributors must not do this. Psystar's next step (excuse the pun) would be to sell assembled PC's and a retail box of MacOS, with a disclaimer telliing the user that they are both sold together, but they should not install the supplied MacOS CD on their hardware (along with a step by step printed installation guide).

What the user does with their 1 user licence is their business as long is it does not cause harm to the company creating the licenced content...

As Apple has done before with Mac cloners (I remember one in the mid 90's), Apple got pissey over them selling hardware cheaper than their own overpriced tat and got them shut down. Now, i'd like to see Apple do this to every PC manufacturer and assembler, as in theory, they are all capable of running MacOS....

The Devil, as Stevie has definitely got ideas above his station...

"free via some government cheat-sheet"

Don't forget that the whole copyright patent thing is based on a government cheat-sheet, as you call it. If you want to have the cake and eat it too, you're in for some shit.

Mine is the one with some international IP-treaties.

People have watching this since April.

http://journals.aol.com/davidhalko/technology/entries/2008/04/29/hackintosh-apple-clone-maker-psystar-is-born/628

I feel the need to point something out as a lot of people seem to be writing posts without actually realising what's happening here.

Psystar 'buy' a copy of OS X to put on each of their machines, they arn't stealing or copying the DVD of just one. This might be against the law or it might not but it's hardly lazy or immoral. Buying an OS and putting it on someone else's hardware is how Windows works and that has many advantages as well as disadvantages to that model.

The issue isn't about stealing anything. It's about whether a company can make and sell a stand-alone OS and then legally stipulate that you can only use it with Hardware that they say you can use it with.

It is of course best for everyone on the planet (except perhaps Apple accountants) that Psystar be allowed to do this, afterall people who like buying from Apple can continue to do so and people who like modified systems (without warrenty) can do what they want to do. This is just another option for consumers with Apple been paid for the part of the machine that is Apple's.

There has to be some truth behind the company's claims its OK.

For example, Dell got into trouble for not letting users put their own ram in by themselves without voiding the warranty.

If the petrol companies signed a deal with a big car company that said you can buy petrol but only put it in company X's cars, would that be legal? THEY are selling the petrol so surely they can do what they like with it?

Paris, because she is as clueless as I am

When apple built their own machines (not just produce pretty PC clones) the EULA was solid. Their software would only run on, and should only be run on, their machines.

Now Apple is selling PC clones with a boot rom that allows you to run their OS and anybody elses OS's. (have your cake and eat it).

Is it unreasonable?

If you buy a ford car and want to stick a honda engine under the bonnet I think fords response would be "good luck to you". You certainly would invalidate any ford warrenty.

However if as a car manufacturer I were to set up a company which converted fords to use honda engines and then sold them on as the "Ford BD". Would Ford disagree?.

To a point this already happens (AMG & Brabus Mercedes). But has to be with the manufacturers agreement.

I would suggest that the EULA is unfair as it prevents individuals running MAC-OS on a PC (buy your ford and stick a honda engine in it, good luck to you).

However as for covenverting PC's to run Mac-os and making money out of it. Sorry without the agreement of the manufacturer I think that is wrong.

Sorry Psystar I think you are on to a looser here.

There were several Anti-Trust cases between IBM and various plug compatable manufacturers in the 60s.

IBM lost every single one of them. This ended in a supreme court "unbundling" ruling stipulating that IBM (and therefore any other hardware or software manufacturer) must sell the hardware and software as separate components to anyone who wants to buy them at the going market rate.

Some of the cases were so close to the Apple situation ( IBM refused to sell its operating system software to a plug compatable manufacturer ) that Apple will need to take this all the way back to the supreme court to get it overturned.

As for the "Apple being creative" comments its BSD unix with pretty windows, the only thing apple created was the bitmaps for the icons.

Paris because .. we'll always have Paris.

>By Anonymous Coward<

>If I write the software and a user buys a license for that software then the license can stipulate that certain hardware should be used. <

Not under English law it can't!

Statute law explicitly voids any conditions or restrictions that you can't see until after purchase (unless, very specifically, you are buying a bus or train ticket with conditions on the back...)

The only restrictions on what you do with software etc. after you buy it are the most basic copyright ones like not making & selling copies without permission.

All other licence conditions etc. that say you must/must not do XYZ or the licence is void, or that you can't transfer it from one machine to another are absolutely meaningless.

This also covers any 'conditions' relating to online activation of software; they are irrelevant - You bought it, You can use it!

I dont get Apples attitude...

The difference between Psystar and any MS-based OEM PC manufacturer is that while MS says "yes, buy our software and use it", Apple seems to be saying "yes, buy our software, but we will sue you if you try to use it"...

If Apple changed their minds and moved away from being a hardware supplier to a software development house only (or even opened up their hardware business to allow OEM developers a look-in), they would find that their marketshare would go up significantly...Unfortunately, little Stevie seems unlikely to want to share...

I may be in the minority, but I think Psystar is in the right here.

I find that more and more software makers try to force trough their EULA terms that are unacceptable or would be considered unacceptable to consumers in the real world. If I buy an OS once I paid for it I consider that instance of the OS is my property and that I should be free to do with it whatever I damn like!

What apple (and others in the software sector) seem to be wanting to do is re-write the rules of commerce and ownership to: "We sell you something but we still own it and we still control what you can do with it once you have bought it. Actually you gave us money for nothing."

If I buy a piece of windows software and I manage to make it run under Linux with Wine I don't see an issue (as long as I don't go crying to the manufacturer for support if something breaks), nobody will refuse to sell the software to me just because I don't own windows. Apple is actually discriminating against owner of non apple hardware! Either they don't sell the OS to anyone or they sell to everybody!

It is similar to entering into a shop to buy a Nike sweatshirt and finding a big label on the one you want that says "we don't authorize you to wear this sweatshirt with non Nike sneakers".

Would you consider this acceptable?

Absolutely not!

Once you bought it it's your property, you wear it with whatever you want as long as you consider it fits well, why would it be different in the software world?

<start rant>

It's amazing how blind a lot of you Macintosh users are.

You actually agree and find it holy that OSX being limited to an <engage emphasis>"apple-labelled"</disengage emphasis> as a good thing? So, then therefore if I wanted to get a MacPro, and change that nasty chassis that you get, keeping the components inside and replacing the chassis, say, with a LianLi case it will void my license by violating the EULA for OSX? Do you see any sense in that?

Apple don't limit the hardware, that's important to stress, just the thing that holds all the hardware inside. Apple DO NOT make hardware, not any of it, not the CPU, the RAM, the hard drives, not the crappy graphics cards they provide (usually a £35 128MB ATI Radeon on machines less than £1.5k). They don't make any of it whatsoever. Magical part is that they just simply run the motherboard on EFI rather than BIOS. Not exactly miraculous is it?

The whole thing is a joke. Apple don't want to open their anti-competitive OS market. If you go onto the Mac forums, either at Mac Rumors, or the apple site itself, you can see why the users are how they are. I salute Psystar for what they are doing, bending over Steve and showing what a c*nt he really is. If you look at their site, they have an entry level machine for around $300 USD, and they say it rivals the performance of a MacPro in accordance to benchmark results. Why can't apple achieve that?

Browsing through the Mac forums is like watching their users being brought up in Post War Germany. Flock of mindless drones who know no better.

So who's more to blame? Microsoft for not challenging the practices of Apple after being bent over by the European Commission constantly for being "anti-competitive".

</end rant>

Psystar get my support. I wish they win with a passion.

um, Uwe, you do realise that I suffer from chronic multiple personality syndrome, and am thus very likely indeed to contradict myself even within the space of a single comments page?

PS, I would like to dissociate myself from that bit about "the shade of someone else's ass"

Good theory, but impractical.

If you start by trying to get Apple's license declared unreasonable, Apple can simply procrastinate. After about five years you will have spent money on lawyers, will have made no income, and might have made some progress on the license. Apple can then make some trivial changes to the license and kick the process back to the start again.

Apple want to sell kit to people with money to burn. It is their choice. Psystar want to sell to a different segment of the market. They could both profit by negotiating an agreement. Instead they are throwing money at lawyers.

If I were Apple, I would want at least three Psystars competing each other out of a profit in the cheap and crappy segment of the market. That way, I could sell more profitable upgrades because Psystar and friends are effectively subsidising the hardware, and I could keep the high profit hardware segment by maintaining a reputation for quality.

At least there is no mandatory Apple tax on laptops.

I'd like to know how you can tell one AC from another!

"they could have stated that you can only get Mac OS with a Mac ... and then sold upgrades that required a registered piece of hardware before they'd work "

Which is effectively what they do - the EULA for OS X says that it can only be used on a Mac, which originally came with a copy of OS X. The only differences are that the box doesn't say "UPGRADE ONLY" on it, and that the enforcement is only via a license agreement rather than anything more intrusive *surely a good thing!)

There's no way that Psystar can "win" here - even if they can get a court to agree that they're allowed to sell machines with OS X installed, Apple could then label the current boxed product as upgrades (with no effect on their customers) and sell non-upgrade versions at a higher price - perhaps comparable with Windows Vista Ultimate.

Software vendors should not be able to impose any conditions beyond what the normal copyright legislation does (like banning making copies to sell or give away).

I mean, in what other technology do you get this kind of silliness? Time again for a car analogy: suppose Ford cars came with an EULA that forbids me from hanging furry dice in it? Or from driving after drinking tea? The complaints Apple makes are in the same class.

I can kind of see Apple's point and I can kind of see Psystar's point. On one hand, I can understand that Apple want to protect their brand by controlling what hardware is used with their software (and making more money from hardware sales to boot), but on the other hand I think they're missing a trick - Microsoft are starting to look a bit like a lumbering giant in the OS stakes - the Vista launch was a disaster that they're only just starting to get over, and people are keen for a change - the Linux distros aren't quite there to take up the mantle, so Apple could quite easily jump in and give MS a run for their money. Whichever way the ruling goes, Apple are going to win, no doubt...

All you fan boys and frothy-mouthed zealots who are claiming that its fine for Apple to abuse their position to make more money from punters by forcing them to buy their branded products should remember two things:

1) If the manufacturer of your car told you you could only play CDs in it that had been purchased (at a vastly inflated price) from them otherwise you'd be breaking the license agreement for it, you'd shit bricks and be up in arms in a nanosecond. Certainly in the UK, car manufacturers used to try this kind of thing by invalidating warranties if you didn't have servicing done in their overpriced dealerships, usually by some poorly trained, spotty and dis-interested YTS trainee even though independants are often better and use exactly the same parts. They got a kicking for this and they are no longer allowed to do it. I see very little difference in this case.

2) Look inside your precious Mac and see what the badge is on the CPU - Intel. Did Apple invent that, or design it, or build it? Did they fuck as like. To paraphrase the first commenter, they are merely leveraging the work of others, the lazy fucks. Why don't they get off their arses and design their own CPUs, north bridges, south bridges, PCI busses, GPUs, memory...........oh wait a minute, its because there's no profit in that. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT MORONS. Do you really think Ford, GM, BMW, VW, Renault, Citroen or any other car manufacturer makes every component in their cars? Of course not, they buy them from specialist manufacturers because that is the most cost efficient way of doing things, and you'd be the first to whine about the price if they did go ahead and make everything themselves.

Frankly, I reckon the manufacturers of all the ancillary hardware used by Apple should stipulate in their licenses that they may not be used for Macs and that way they'd die out and we'd be free of the odious smugness that ozzes from every pore of the self-righteous Apple sheep.

Ahh, that'll explain all the proprietry hardware Apple are now using then - gfx by Nvidia (you didn't make that, did you Apple), motherboards by someone else (Asus ?!?), hard drives by someone else (who cares)

So, with all the clearly generic kit, you now think Apple make their own kit - from scratch - without any influence or input from *anyone* else ?

As I can buy generic kit of a similar specification for far far less than Apple want to resell someone elses' generic bundle of kit for, why can't I use software paid for and built to run on generic hardware ?

Mine's the one with "soon to be running OSX on a £115 Proliant ML115" on the back...

This is indeed a very good question... Windows/Unix merely sets the limits of the functionality of the hardware that it runs on, so surely it is firmware, i.e. somewhere between hardware and software.

Hardware is basically a bundle of hardwired switches.

Software is supposed to enable this bundle of switches to be infinitely flexible.

So far the nearest we have come to producing a genuine operating system that actually does this, is the IBM midrange AS400/OS400 combination (or whatever it is called these days). However the marketing boys at IBM don't want anyone to know (in case it damages their mainframe/unix or PC (ha-ha Lenovo) sectors), so they make sure that it is artificially restricted (limited number of users depending on the licence purchased), ridiculously expensive and under advertised.

I agree, much as I like the spirit of what Psystar do & I would personally like to see other companies such as them offer OS-x compatible PCs & laptops, then they must do so with the agreement of Apple.

Safari for windows being pushed out with their itunes update a few months ago.

It had a EULA that said it could only be installed on apple hardware.

So, in essence what a lot of complete d!ckwads are saying is that it is ok for apple to make all itunes updaters (some many millions of people I imagine) petty criminals, but it is not ok for someone else to do what they do.

If Apple is happy to distribute their software onto Windows PC's under a license stating that it is installed on apple branded hardware, then I have to assume that ALL windows PC's are now apple branded hardware by their definitions.

After all its all the same hardware underneath the case. INTEL cpu's NVidia/Radeon GFX, etc etc. SAME STUFF as any PC.

I hope that psistar fux them up in court.

No-one else would get away with this sort of thing - it's an anti-competitive licencing term with no solid reasoning behind it and the law should rule as such.

Imagine if Microsoft announced a change to their EULA to say you could only use it with Intel CPUs, not use it with a BlueRay drive or only with a specific make of graphics card. Who would stand up and defend that on the grounds "Well it's their licence they can do what they like"?

Apple shouldn't be permitted to link the usage of the software to specific hardware but they should be able to limit the warrantee (i.e. "run it on any hardware you like but if it's not Apple approved don't come crying to us if it doesn't work").

Many people have drawn comparisons to CDs and DVDs - the licence on a DVD doesn't stop you putting an R1 DVD in an R2 player, just don't expect it to work.

AMG & Brabus Mercedes are something completely different. There are lots of companies that will change the engine in your car. It is a complex process, but can be done. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head is there are people selling Smart cars with 'busa engines and Lotus's with Honda engines (or they were until Lotus started doing it themselves).

The difference with AMG & Brabus is to do with the complexity of the German laws and the different Tax regulations to do with being classed as a car manufacturer or a tuner.

Also, changing the engine would not void your whole warranty, only the parts affected by the change. For example, if you change the engine you would not always be coverd for drive train problems, unless you can prove that a problem was due to a fault by the original manufacturer, but if, say, one of your doors fell off, you would be.

The other difference is a car maker is selling a whole car. Apple is clearly selling two products. Bundled, but still two distinct products. If they only sold the OS with the computer then fine, but they don't.

Bit of a bad analogy with the Ford, Honda thing.

On the other hand, if you were to fit said Honda engine to a Ford and call it your own brand (therefore not using Ford's trademarked name) eg: Fonda (TM) I don't see how either party could complain when Ford had willingly and freely sold you the car, and Honda willingly and freely sold you the engine.

It would be no different to buying an Arial Atom which comes from the factory with a Honda Vtec engine as standard.

Mines the one with the Fonda Moncord (tm) keys in.....

So if crApple wins , does that mean that all the copyleft material used in the core of leopard now becomes copyright and thus all the Berkley BSD/UNIX Linux fanatics and end users will be subject to a tax assessment from the Cupertino pirates , how evil is that !

Now we know why crApple is so consistent with the abuses of the DMCA Act that be for sure in order to take control of all open source by stealth !

I think Apple's problem is that people could build machines that run Mac OS really badly (and possibly run Windows well), which could give Apple a bad name to many of the customers who buy them. One solution would be to have some code in the OS that checks the hardware and displays a message whenever it's booted up on a non-Apple machine: "This Hardware is not compatible with OS X". Stick the code right in the heart of the OS so that the only way to get rid of it would be to modify the original code, which would most definitely be against any EULA.

This case has nothing to do with an EULA. It just happnes to be a good way to defend yourself.

The entire point of the rejection, and court action by Apple is to stop people like Psystar using OSX on something which is not L1 (verified).

The Apple world works because much like server gear, and top end hardware everything is verified to work. Of course, if Apple starts selling boxed copies of it's much famed OSX next to, say, Vista then problems begin.

People start putting OSX on their own machines. OSX starts to show flaws, security issues, stability problems and more far beyond anything it has found itself in before because the hardware it is working with is simply not verified for the operating system. There is no doubt Psystar will fight this. I hope they win. I want to be able to buy OSX off the shelf. I want an end to the lies of Apple. I want a level playing field.

Will Psystar win? I doubt it. If they did win, and OSX was forced to be in the end user world for custom builds...then the entire Apple empire comes crashing down.

Amdahl already did this with mainframes... IBM refused to licence their then MVS operating system to Amdahl on pretty much the same grounds that Apple are using.

Amdahl screamed unfair.... And IBM lost. and Amdahl made the competition for IBM. IBM finally killed them and other competitors by moving to a new 32bit architecture that Amdahl didn't have the funds to develop competing systems for.

Apple sell very expensive boxes. There's very little in them that isn't bog standard PC architecture. There's no real technical justification in their stance - just financial, by protection of a (small) monopoly. Fair competition would be good.

I'd love to see apple put their money into making OS/X available for any of the pieces of kit that Linux and XP run on. Would make Vista's problems look trivial for a long time. But they won't. Lock-in and exclusivity are their game. But it isn't going to happen - unless challenges like this succeed. Too much money to lose.

I think Apple are being very clever here - Sexy O/S. Sexy, but way overpriced hardware. Restricted hardware set to minimise support issues. And a clever marketing campaign to convince people that buying on looks is cool, even if it's costly....

& before you ask, I run a mixed & legal XP/Linux setup at home. Now to wait for the Apple fanboys to vent their rage as I've attacked their holy grail.

Title says it all really, imagine Windows HP or IE for DELL, I mean damn, they slapped MS around just for putting a browser in the OS.

I hope Jobs gets his comeupance on this one, since the last apple i bought was a granny smith, and that ended up in the bin cause it was rotten in the core.

I beleive that going back to the IBM PC clone, if their boot rom or whatever is reproduced (however it's done) then they can't do squat about it. IBM lost to 3rd party vendors over bios code, so Jobsie should loose to. But then the law is a funny thing - never seem to side with the logical.

Mines the one with the flameproof liner :)

There are plenty of car companies that buy cars, do things to them and then sell them on, without the original makers permission.

If this was Microsoft doing this, for instance if the only mouse and keyboard that would work with windows are microsoft ones; then the world would be up in arms and they would be fined a gazillion dollars. Because it's apple it must be ok.

"It really is a cheek of another company to think they can just leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks, why don't they just fund and write an operating system themselves."

It really is a cheek of Apple to think they can just leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks, why don't they just fund and manufacture a CPU/Motherboard/RAM/Video card themselves.

If you think MS are using anti-competitive business pactices, then Apple take it to a whole new level.

Why dont they sell a box as one item ie the computer. Then sell OS as another item. If buy both give away a free disk so this would all work together.

If you agree that Psystar is violating the law by running OSX on non Apple hardware, do you then agree that using a Logitech mouse, a Dell monitor, an HP printer are all uses of OSX with non-Apple hardware? Do you think Apple then has the right to perform checks of ALL your hardware and shut down it's product if it finds non-sanctioned equipment? Are you O.K. with the fact that Apple can amend it's EULA at any time and hold you to the new terms without a refund if you then decide you don't like them? Are you also O.K. with the fact that as Joe Consumer, you don't know what the EULA is until you buy the product, get it home, open the box, break the seal that says you agree to the EULA(still, without being presented with the full terms!), and begin installing?!??! At this point you can't take it back to the place where you purchased it, because they won't refund opened software. Like a previous poster said, the EULA can state whatever it wants, but there is no saying it's legally binding until it's challenged. I hope Apple loses this one, as it will set a precedent for all other consumer electronics suppliers. If Apple want's to control their product, they could act as the sole distributor and require a serial number for purchase of upgrades. Many other companies follow that model and nobody gives them press time at all.

They could use an open-source BSD derivative, tweek the front end to look like a mac (as we've seen soooo many times), then all they need to do is write a nice bit of code to allow mac programs to run on it.

Ok so that is the tricky part, but its only one program...the Samba and Wine open source projects did it to interoperate with MS stuff so its possible.

Let em argue about licenses I have mac and linux, if i dont want to spend the cash on a (pointlessly) white laptop then i dont, i'm not going to buy a mac wannabe, I'll not have a mac.

it's not buying a Ford and putting a Honda engine in it, since Ford chassis are proprietary and different enough from Honda chassis to make them incompatible.

Now that Apple hardware is essentially a PC, it's more like building a identical Ford-alike chassis yourself using generic components, then putting a Ford-branded engine in it

I've been expecting this to occur before long: every major consumer product starts requiring acceptance of a EULA before you can start using it.

After all, cars contain "intellectual property" that you technically "license" the use of when purchasing the "package" it comes in.

So put your future cap on. Envision the day that your car MUST connect to the Internet every day to insure that the "Genuine Ford Experience" software is up to date, or it won't start.

The EULA states that opening the bonnet (ie, "reverse engineering") is a violation of the license, and will cause the vehicle to immediately freeze, requiring the purchase of a new "license" (vehicle).

I could go on. However, bear in mind: these EXACT ideas ARE being mooted about in Detroit, Stuttgart, Tokyo, et.al. ; more precisely, the EXTENT to which these licenses can be mandated and enforced is being rigorously explored by auto makers world-wide. Not just "voids the warranty", but "seizure of licensed property and imposition of infringement fines" are under legal discussion.

The precedent is already there: failure to use a licensed HDMI cable to connect your DVD to your TV is a DMCA and patent violation (read the fine print) - the bulk of the cost for an HDMI cable is the license fee paid to the patent holders.

So be very, VERY careful about what you wish for. You could have it in spades all too quickly.

(As a bootnote: it is a widely studied grad school case study that Apple lost domination to Microsoft in the 1990s precisely BECAUSE of these same restrictions. And review the history of Windows vs. OS/2 for a case study of what happens when you DON'T enforce IP licensing...)

"Ford can't make you buy oil and tires from the dealer"

Not sure about Ford, but Audi strongly enforce a specific type of long-life oil which appears only to be sold in their garages...

I guess Apple are proud of their OS, and want to use it to sell the hardware - and don't want to be undermined by someone selling other similar hardware giving a similar system to what Apple are trying to sell. The fact that this guy is selling boxes with OS-X pre-installed means that he's a direct competitor to Apple, whilst being in violation of their very clear software licensing terms.

They bought out emagic and immediately cut support for the PC version of Logic Audio. If Microsoft did that all Mac users would have a giant fit and they would be taken to court for being a monopoly again. Sure you can say that it costs extra to develop on 2 platforms but they were doing it before the buyout quite happily...

Yup, but if you SELL the software, you are now under various regulations:

First sale. Allows resale.

Merchantability. If you can't use it, you must give a refund.

Interoperability. Copyright is often limited to ensure interoperability.

Tell you what, if you don't like the conditions, don't sell your software. Of course, you get no money for it, but you DO get to keep your software!

Buying oil for a car, or indeed the car itself, is different to buying software.

Operating systems in particular are not sold - you are buying the right to use the software within the terms of the licence. You never actually ownthe software.

So Apple is within it's rights to take action.

There probably IS someone out there who has installed Linux on a washing machine.

You'd be suprised.

Given Apples marketing skills, surely they'd make a fortune by selling OS-X standalone to run on any PC.

It would put the wind up MS for sure.

Their own hardware would still sell by the bucket load (nobody else I know of puts so much into the case design).

// I am rooting for Apple here, even though I will probably never buy one of their machines. It really is a cheek of another company to think they can just leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks, why don't they just fund and write an operating system themselves.

Probably because a custom written OS would only ever occupy a tiny niche... Third parties would never port apps to it since it would have no users, and users would not use it because it has no apps.

Proprietary OS's including OSX and windows to an even greater extent do things in non standard ways to make cloning them difficult. If OSX was simply a distribution of linux and didn't rely on anything proprietary, making your own distribution would be easy enough.. For instance most third party apps designed for redhat work just fine on other distributions.

Apple are selling 2 distinct products, their hardware and their OS... This company is merely purchasing one of them and using it with their own hardware, they are not ripping it off they actually encourage their users to purchase it.

there have been a few Mac clone makers over the years. even with supposed agreement from the sunshiney arsehole of apple themselves. but only so long as they didn't compete directly with apple products. ie. lower spec cpu, gfx, etc. some even got round it by offering much better spec machines than apple, and mac cpu/gfx accelerators for standard machines.

none of them exist anymore...

i think psystar will just become a PC distributor playing off their 15 mintes of fame from an apple cease and decist judgement untill they disappear into the ether from whence they came.

nice try though.

I think some of you need to understand that an out of the box DVD from Apple can not be installed on any PC, it needs a bootloader to emulate the boot ROM of an Apple machine.

Also try buying a Psystar machine and the OS without paying them to install it, they come up with the excuse that it is hard to install so they have to do it, OSX is the easiest OS to install so what are they doing to install it?

Yours on a homebrew iHack

Pharmaceuticals products can be useful for diseases other than approved. Doctors decide when to use, Health Authorities forbid marketing until proven useful.

This matches the Mac status where homebrew is tolerated, but clone sales not.

While warnings of active component interactions are common, I can't imagine anyone writing a licence forbiding use of one tablet with another. They even build the competitor's active component into the same tablet, after patents run out.

If Psystar can write an original ROM that runs a Mac OS, and lets users buy the OS, they should be okay.

The status of licences for old versions seems more favorable to manufacturers than a patent: though that's more an XP/ Vista problem at the moment.

In the end, a licence cannot control end-point use, despite monitoring, registration, and other DRM-like spoiling tactics.

Maybe Sony should enforce an EULA on its blu-ray discs that it only plays on Sony hardware.

Like that much guys? No? Didn't think so.

How about Philips making CD's that only play on Philips hardware?

Like that Apple pips? Oh wait, you already put it with it already! Its called itunes..

And there lies the rub. Not much point arguing the nuances of this case with an Apple pip. They are deluded.

Surely? I wonder what would happen if it MS (Or M$ to you haters out there) started producing propietry hardware and insisted that if you wanted a PC with Vista then you had to buy it from them. That would, essentially, reduce the new PC market to Microsoft and Apple.

Paris because she can get it from anywhere

back to System 7 or so...

Back then, any (beeffy) Amiga owner felt smug because our souped up boxes totally trounced Macs. 060 vs 040 was a no show...

Yes, it was somewhat a pain to get the Mac ROMS (buy if possible, hack an old Mac to death, etc...) but it did work pretty ok.

Did it piss Apple? Not really. Come on, how many Amigas were there? Even less so high specced ones (price, availability, etc)..

Forward to today. Is Psystar pissing off Apple? To no end. Why? Because they're probably selling half decent kit at half decent price, thus showing off how badly overpriced and underspecced Apples own boxes really are.

No love for Apple. They changed to x86 because they were loosing the race badly. But, in doing so, they opted into a market were competition is fierce and parts readily available. Now they need that lill EULA to keep them afloat selling overpriced kit. Good luck on maintaining the status quo now that someone is having the balls to challenge them on fair use and other rights.

Or maybe they can go back to putting (part) of the OS in the ROM and refusing to sell them (sounds familiar...). Then it would be back to scavenging parts from dead Macs... Hobbyist can do it, but a business cant run on it.

According to the article, Psystar plan primarily to challenge Apple not on the grounds the the EULA is unenforceable per se, but that it is a monopolistic practice. I'm not 100% au fait with American monopolies law, but I'll dare wager that it's about distortion of competitive markets, like most monopoly law. In that case, the question is surely whether the EULA has a substantial effect on the ability of other firms to compete in the relevant market. Psystar are presumably hoping they can persuade a judge that the relevant market is "computers that people can install OS X onto", which is clearly a silly circular argument. Any practice distorts a market if you define the market to be only the products affected by the practice. I'd imagine it's more likely that the judge will look at whether the EULA substantially affects competition in the market for "people building computers and bundling OSs with them". In which case the court will probably decide that it doesn't because most people don't use Apple products, so when they come to buy a computer they aren't affected.

There's a slightly philosophical argument that the EULA distorts the market by preventing people from taking up OS X who otherwise might, but it isn't the sort of reasoning that usually works in anti-competitive practice cases and is probably impossible to establish with evidence anyway.

To my mind, Psystar don't have a hope.

Yeah, been there, done that, nearly broke the company. Great short term for end-users; not so much long term.

Apple's business model is that they make better margin on hardware than is the industry norm; this effectively cross-subsidises the OS business.

To forgo a chunk of the volume they get by bundling hardware & OS (and all the nice stuff that comes with it, like Time Machine, iApps etc), they'd need to apply a premium to the OS, so the overall prices would rise.

Plus of course the testing regime (and cost) would have to increase significantly to properly regression test any update against the much higher number of machine configurations out there.

"After all its all the same hardware underneath the case. INTEL cpu's NVidia/Radeon GFX, etc etc. SAME STUFF as any PC."

Is that why I can merely place in an OS X DVD into a PC and watch it happily install?

Everything's a 'PC' at the end of the day to a differing degree - XBox, Playstation. Do we classify the XBox as a PPC Mac due to it's PowerPC CPU?

This case is not that different from Sony banning PS2 PC emulators back in the day.

You do realise that Mach was derived from the BSD Unix kernel? The virtual memory subsystem written for Mach even made it back into the BSD mainstream.

The massive problem with your monopoly arguments is that Apple _don't have a monopoly_, at least according to any market definition that a court would accept. After all, as others have pointed out, Psystar could happily have installed Vista, Linux etc. and had a functional PC. If Apple don't have a monopoly position, they are completely free to bundle and price any way they want. If they price too high, make their products inaccessible to the public or don't produce good software, the market will take care of it quickly enough.

The obvious market for Mac OS X is computer operating systems, where Apple have, to put it politely, a minimal if growing market share. If Apple had a monopoly in sales of operating systems, like Microsoft, it would be a completely different matter - they would be acting illegally by tying together OS and hardware to distort competition in the hardware market.

However, the only market in which Apple could be actually said to have a monopoly is in the Mac OS X software market, which is of course true as the _whole point_ of copyright is grant a limited monopoly over distribution of the copyrighted work. But no court in the world is going to accept that market definition as, apart from anything else, it would turn every software developer, every artist, man, woman and child who had ever strung together a sentence or drawn a picture (all of which are works which are automatically copyrighted) into a monopolist.

By the way, although I love my iMac, I'm no Apple apologist. If you want to look at real potential monopolistic behaviour, you only have to look as far Apple's tying of the iTunes Music Store with the iPod. These are both markets where Apple almost certainly does have a monopoly, and the bundling serves to help lock out competitors.

Apple's business model says they sell the entire package, you are buying a box, which includes computer and OS as a single item. They do offer upgrades to the operating system (boxed copies of the OS), but these aren't the same as buying Windows off the shelf, not conceptually at least.

Exactly what is under the hood of the machine is irrelevant, unlike Microsoft Apple are not OS vendors, they are system vendors with a custom OS for those machines, they don't license copies of their OS individually, as a result, purchased or not Psystar are selling unlicensed copies of OSX because they aren't selling the Mac half of the item. Now if Psystar was bright they'd sell OSX upgrades and the machines seperately and just happen to make the machine compatible, but selling them as Macintosh clones is an expensive dead end. They can't win because all other OS/Machine combinations would instantly come up for grabs, e.g. PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, even down to the photo copier sitting in your office. The fact the Mac uses normal PC components isn't really relevant, because there is no conceptual break between OS and hardware in this case.

I've got one which uses this long life oil. If you look around you will find that you can buy oil to the same spec from lots of places - you can even buy the castrol one (SLX Longlife II I think?) in my local BP petrol station. Unfortunately, it's no cheaper than the main dealer. But in my case, much easier to get to.

Once I went to a small motor factor (can't remember where, I was out at diggerland and my oil light came on), and bought 5L of some OEM stuff which claimed to be to spec. It didn't seem to cause any problems, and I was told as long as it's the right VW spec, it's fine. It was about half the normal price.

Way off topic, but it happens to be a subject close to my heart.

More annoying is the fact that you can't maintain the longlife services if you don't have the VAG computer system - a manual reset only gives you the standard service interval.

Maybe my choosing of the word "monopoly" is wrong from a legal point of view, but according to what is in the EULA, this is exactly what Apple is trying to enforce: If you want to use MacOS X, you *MUST* only use it on a Mac, even of other platforms are technically capable of running this - and we will enforce this rule by force of intimidation or law.

If I buy a licence for Windows, I want to be able to install it on whatever hardware I want as long as it is (today) x86 compatable.

The same goes for Solaris, for OS/2... or MacOS for x86 macs... I purchased the CD off the shelf, it's x86 compatible. I darn well want to install it on any x86 hardware that is compatible.

Oh, I can't because Apple want me to buy their hardware too.

In France, this licence would be struck as illegal as this licence agreement pushes forced "linked sales" : if you want to purchase product X (MacOS X / iPhone) you must also purchase product Y (Mac computer / iPhone contract) - this is why apple's exclusivity lock in for Orange in France was deemed illegal by the courts: You must be able to buy subscription without the phone or phone without the subscription, leaving the customer with choice.

And as MacOS is cheaper than the equivalent full box version of Windows XP, I would love to purchase MacOS X and install it on my laptop to replace Vista - but no, the licence forbids that, and Apple issues takedown notices to anyone that publishes that information, even to people that have legally purchased a licence to use...

But as installing on anything other than a mac is a breach of that licence... So this licence only serves one thing: To force by legal means the sales of MacOS with Apple hardware, to the detriment of consumer choice.

Steve could make fortunes by selling MacOS to us PC users, some of who would welcome a replacement to Windows with somthing else than Linux, with decent support and a well designed interface. The fact that it would also be about 70% cheaper than the equivalent Windows would also be an added bonus.

He could make a ton of cash and still keep Apple hardware sales from the hardcore fans, as even as a windows/linux fan, any mac is better designed than the aluminium desktop case that Psysis is using as illustrated in the article.

It would seem that the Hardware team at Apple still has the same power over the sofware teams as they did when "Star Trek" (MacOS on PC) was proposed in the early 90's and crushed.

About the monopoly issue, you can see it this way:

Apple has a monopoly on OSX compatible operating systems that is granted to them by the copyright law. That in itself is not so much a problem.

The problem is that they are leveraging that monopoly in the OSX operating system software to gain a monopoly in the hardware business by preventing other hardware manufactures to compete in the OSX-compatible hardware business.

Apple has a lawful monopoly in OSX software that they try to use to gain an unlawful monopoly in OSX compatible hardware.

It is pretty much the same as when Microsoft used their OS monopoly to try to get a monopoly in browsers (IE).

Much will also depend on weather the courts decide that Apple actually has a monopoly with OSX. If you consider that there is a whole ecosystem of software that can only work with OSX then I would say yes (in short, if you have mac software you are forced to buy OSX to continue to use your software when you buy a new computer). If the judge consider that users could switch to another operating system without much loss of functionality (they can run their OSX software in Linux or Windows) then I would say no.

Personally I would say that yes, Apple has a monopoly, since once you have invested in OSX compatible software you are pretty much stuck buying your OS from them. The think is that you shouldn't be forced to buy your hardware from them too.

The "No monopoly" would be only true if for all OSX software you could get a Windows or Linux version for free. This is the case with some software (Firefox, iTunes or DAZ3D's software for example) but not for all software (if you have Photoshop for mac I don't think adobe gives you the windows version for free if you happen to upgrade from your mac to a Windows PC).

Fancy getting this wound up, it's tragic.

Apple sell computers, whole ones, not computer hardware, and not operating systems seperately. Not components. They aren't PC world, of your favourite online tat bazarre.

I bought a Macbook with Tiger (go on, boo and hiss), then I upgraded it to Leopard. The Leopard DVD I bought isn't an off the shelf operating system, that I am free to install (as one wonderful comment above notes) on my washing machine or whatever I like, I am free to use it on a previously bought computer system from Apple.

It's not possible to install Leopard (legally) without proving that I have qualifying media. I needs to know I have an Apple supplied copy of a previous OS that was purchased with an Apple computer first.

There is no way Pystar can possibly install leopard without breaking this fundamental rule. The end.

Anti-Trust? Not with less than 5% world market share

Invalid EULA? Rock solid in concept, and I suspect in legal-ese also.

These guys are ripping off on the hard work of others. As for anyone seriously suggesting that Apple should just sell the OS anyway, and let you choose what to run it on - honestly, this may appeal to your "me me me" way of thinking, but it's just not going to work - the profits made from selling the hardware, help fund the company to help produce the software. It's a closed system. If they just sold the OS and let the clone makers run free, how long before it would be unsustainable to produce new hardware, and how long before they abandon OSX development because they can't make a profit on it, thus sending even the clone makers out of the market.

Balmer made a great point about the whole MAC eco system as being closed, which is why they were successful. It's a different way of doing thigs to Microsoft. Yes you can buy a shrink wrap copy of Vista (how much is a decent copy of Vista when compared to Leopard? How much would Leopard suddently cost when they can't subsidise it through hardware sales...) and install it on your firdge if it will take it, just because the vast majority of PC Windows users do just that doesn't mean that defacto it if the only way to sell an OS.

Apple sells computers. When they make new computers, with newer operating systems, they provide the opportunity for previous users to access the updated OS, for their older hardware. They are not an OS vendor. There is no "right" to install this on a clone PC.

If you buy Mac OS X, then how you use it is up to you.

Sure it's illegal to copy it but you can run it on any hardware you choose. The hardware conditions of the Apple EULA is not enforceable in the EU, apparently - as this commentator suggests:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/04/14/openmac_advertised_for_39999.html#comment-1048710

Quoted here for convenience

"Oh dear no, not this again!

1) The reason Apple cannot stop anyone installing a retail copy of OSX on anything they want is the same reason Microsoft cannot stop anyone running a retail copy of Office on anything they want. It is also the reason Black and Decker cannot stop you using DIY drills in the way of trade, and the reason why Vauxhall cannot stop you installing after market parts in your old Cavalier, and the reason why Faber and Faber cannot stop you reading the Collected Poems of TS Eliot in the bathroom by making it a condition of sale that you agree not to.

It is because post-sales restrictions on use are not enforceable in the EU. Not by EULA, not by signed document at time of sale, not if you have to dance it to a jig and sing your agreement in Mandarin before leaving the store. You cannot relinquish your statutory rights as a condition of buying a product, and one of them is freedom from post sales restrictions on use. Read those guarantee forms vendors invite you to send in sometime. See that part about your statutory rights not being affected? Think that's there out of the goodness of their hearts? Its not, its there because its the law.

2) And no, you did not just license it, you bought a copy. As when you bought your copy of the Collected Poems. Or you bought that copy of the Rasumovsky Quartet. Or you bought that drill. Calling something a license not a sale does not make it so. If it walks and quacks like a sale, that is what it will be held to be.

3) And come out of your dream world about "OSX is written for the hardware, and consequently it is far more reliable. OSX is basically a hand tailored suit made in Hong Kong whilst windows is a mix clothes from Marks , Oxfam and things left on a bus. Nothing quite fits...."

OSX relates to its perfectly standard though mostly mid range hardware in exactly the same way any other OS does. It uses drivers. You may not be familiar with these things, they are bits of software written mostly by vendors which permit an OS to address the hardware in question. Driver quality is important. But there is no material difference in how any modern OS relates to hardware and drivers. Thinking that OSX has somehow a more intimate relationship to an nVidia graphics card than Windows or Linux is idiotic. And by the way - its not that the OS was written for the peripheral hardware. Its that the drivers were written for the OS.

Or maybe you are thinking of the processors? Cannot be. Surely you do not think that OSX was written for the Core 2 in some different way than Windows or Linux was?

Please wake up there!

In conclusion. The Apple hardware is no better than anyone elses. It is however a more expensive solution to most computing problems, a more unbalanced set of components, and often is crammed into monstrous industrially designed cases. Perforated aluminum must be one of the worse materials ever for floor standing cases. Well, concrete might be a bit worse. The overheating problems with the laptops are legendary. You will mostly find low end or even obsolete graphics cards coupled with the most expensive processors around, mediocre memory, and too little of it, and very middle range disk drives. Power supplies are at best adequate. You'll find, as with the Mini, hardware features, like the ability to carry it around in your coatpocket, that hardly anyone needs, but which cripple performance though they improve appearance in some circles. It is no more and no less a hodgepodge than any other middle range Intel based machines, just rather more expensive, and less well balanced. Maybe its more of a hodgepodge in fact.

Prediction: this will never come to court. Just as MS will never sue someone for running retail copies of Office under Wine, even though the EULA says it has to be run only on Windows. Why? Because they know they would lose. As would Apple. Now whether this particular company can be bullied out of what it is trying? We'll see. Maybe. This stable door was opened in law however when the first retail copy of OSX was put on sale. Too late to close it now."

Software is still a bit difficult to classify. As just one example of its quirky nature is the fact that it's the only copyright protected work that needs to be copied AND modified to 'use'. The ambiguity surrounding what software 'is' has allowed companies to attempt to protect their software using every existing IP right in the book and then some (the ELUA).

For example, most software (with the exception of most console games) is sold protected by both copyright, and license restrictions on use. This is why I still had to purchase a Vista 64 disk despite already having a valid license for it. If this was taken to trial, it is highly likely that a Judge would see this as something a company should not be doing.

If Psystar gets what they're seeking though, it will drastically reduce the effectiveness of every ELUA that exists, and affect more than just Apple in ways I am unable to fully speculate without a cup of coffee.

@ Alexis Vallance

"If you don't think the terms are fair, you challenge them. You do not challenge them by ignoring the terms and make a profit as a result."

Um, that's EXACTLY how you challenge them.

Most companies just make their ELUAs as restrictive as possible and wait for them to be tested in court to see what sticks. But this sort of thing never goes to court unless someone is making/losing money due to to the ELUA being enforced/breached.

It's hard to prove 'damages' based on money you ~might~ have made if the ELUA restrictions were reasonable. And contrary to what the RIAA would like you to think, if you're not making any money, it's very hard for a software vendor to prove they're losing any, and they're not going to waste their time on you if they can't.

Apple did far worse when they used the iPhone trademark before they had the rights to it. It looks like everything worked out for them however, and to be fair Apple did start the whole i'Thing' branding trend (or did they?). I just wonder how much Cisco got for it.

However, Psystar aren't using the monopoly of "OS's" but monopoly abuse.

If you're restraining free trade by using the government grant of monopoly that is copyright to demand that MacOS X can't be resold or installed on a computer not branded as an Apple Mac, that is illegal restraint of trade using Apple's monopoly on code for OS X.

That is abuse of monopoly.

Unless Apple don't have copyright.

Apple cannot legally impose restrictions willy-nilly on what the people who pay their wages do with products they bought and paid for with the fruits of their own efforts of hand or brain.

See, there are these things called "statutory rights", which are granted to you by the Law of the Land; and nothing in an EULA can affect such rights. Once a copy of OS X has left Apple's possession, they are not in a position to stipulate what may or may not be done with it.

It is the Law of the Land (the conjunction of the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as amended and the Sale of Goods Act 1979 as amended), not the EULA, which gives you permission to install software you rightfully own on a computer you rightfully own -- otherwise, the software would not be fit for purpose. Any EULA provision which contradicts this is void; and if there is no severability clause, the whole EULA might be void.

"Operating systems in particular are not sold - you are buying the right to use the software within the terms of the licence."

So pirating a CD and putting the cracked version on BT is no loss to MS because their OS is licensed not sold, so putting the CD there causes nil losses? Because that's not true, is it.

It can't be that way anyway because the only thing that stops you from installing multiple copies is copyright and the license cannot be copyrighted.

NOTE: Linux you DO buy. The license is how you can break the controls of copyright under certain conditions, but the OS and CD and applications ARE YOURS.

Makes the "TCO" figures hard to do when you don't "own" your applications unless they are GPL'd, doesn't it?

"However if as a car manufacturer I were to set up a company which converted fords to use honda engines and then sold them on as the "Ford BD". Would Ford disagree?."

There are quite a few companies that buy new cars, tart them up, and resell them at a much higher price. Ford don't care, they don't have to deal with the warranty and they sell more cars.

An EULA is like any other pseudo-legal document. Some parts of it will be legally binding, others won't be. For instance, extreme sports companies often have a disclaimer for liability over death and serious injury. In reality it's unenforceable, regardless of whether you've agreed to it.

I'd imagine Psytar's claim will firstly be that Apple is monopolistic (it's arguable - they're preventing you running their software on anything but their hardware, and can set prices accordingly. You could make a similar argument about Itunes). I'm not that clued up on US competition law, but on the surface they'd actually have a reasonable claim there.

Secondly, they'll almost certainly argue that even if they're not anti-competitive, the EULA is unenforceable.

It'd definitely be interesting to head Apple arguing that they're not anti-competitive, given the circumstances...

Nope, monopoly is copyright, copyright is monopoly.

You cannot make a MacOS X operating system without breaking several IP laws.

I note there is a lot of noise in this thread about Apple's "overpriced" kit and how Psystar is just undercutting it.

How come then, in a group test of £999 laptops in the May 2008 edition of Personal Computer World the MacBook got a "recommended"? They even stuck Vista on it at one point, poor thing. It wasn't even the highest spec MacBook they could have got at that price, yet it held its own against similarly priced machines from other vendors. They also point out that it was their favourite machine on test and that following a spec upgrade just before going to press "now it appears to have very few flaws indeed".

And, as others have pointed out, one of the reasons Apple's stuff "just works" is that they don't attempt to support every hardware variation under the sun - the OS is tailored to known hardware, even if it is now more generic than it used to be. And if you want a cheap Mac, why not get a Mini? Nicely built from verified hardware in a compact case, rather than some hulking great thing with dodgy/cheap hardware and the OS crammed on with no support. Irrespective of the legalities, buying a Psystar is just making your own life difficult, frankly. Your choice, natch, but I'd sooner get my stuff done quickly and easily and have time left for a bit of living rather than spend it wrestling with hardware/software problems. Which is one reason I switched to a Mac in the first place. I don't need the grief that comes with the average generic PC. Also applies to my EEE, which has its tailored Linux and again pretty much "just works" out of the box.

I actually BOUGHT a Psystar, and I love it. I paid $300 plus $155 for the OS X retail package, plus shipping. Since that time Psystar has made improvements that let me get normal Apple software updates from apple.com, and now they're shipping free updated restore media to any registered customer that requests it. As far as I'm concerned, Psystar is opening an issue that should and now will be decided in the courts - namely, how far can vendors restrict their products' usage via the shrinkwrap EULA? Have at it, I say! Let the legal fur fly. If Apple wanted to keep control of the keys to the kingdom, they should have stayed on proprietary hardware, and not simply gone to repackaging vanilla clone guts. Frankly, OS X is better than Windows, and if Apple had any brains they would push to get their superior software into the enterprise via every channel available, like M$ did so successfully. And let's be frank here - Apple, M$, and all the other kings of proprietary software are sociopathic control freaks who need a good slapping. Kill 'em all, I say. They're all smug, greedy SOBs.

While I agree, it *should* be possible to run OSX on any configuration of PC hardware (does that still mean IBM compatible these days incidentally?) it's besides the point.

The quickest and simplest way for Apple to win this case is to get Psystar to demonstrate how it manages its feat. There are two possible ways that have been identified:

1) modifying the OSX install discs

2) emulating the boot loader that identifies it as a Mac

Both possibilities are quite clearly illegal. You're either modifying intellectual property (option 1) or you're reverse engineering the boot loader (option 2). Both of which won't be looked at kindly in a court.

Although Apple will bleat about the licence and whether they are or are not allowed to do it, they really don't have to - they can win this simply on the "how" question.

Microsoft tried this with DOS, attempting to lock out Caldera / DrDOS - ruled against several years later, with a payout of millions in Caldera's favour IIRC...

"1) modifying the OSX install discs

2) emulating the boot loader that identifies it as a Mac

Both possibilities are quite clearly illegal. You're either modifying intellectual property (option 1) or you're reverse engineering the boot loader (option 2). Both of which won't be looked at kindly in a court."

Uh, copyright doesn't care about #1 unless a loss is made therefrom or you misrepresent the goods. Hell, if they give you a "shim" code that changes the OS but they distribute only the pristine CD and a CD with the changes on and YOU, the customer enact it, then there has been no copyright controlled actions taken without license.

Reverse engineering is likewise not illegal.

Actually, if some terms of a license are illegal, you do not need to follow them...

For instance, if a joker added "by reading this, you agree to kill your neighbour in the next 24 hours" to one of these EULAs you click one without reading, you will not have to do it. Thankfully.

From what I've heard, half of the EULAs contain something which is very probably illegal. The problem is, only a court can decide whether it is legal or not. In that sense, EULAs are only "potentially" legal. Some people decide to obey the EULAs, some do not.

When the outcome of a lawsuit is uncertain, the company itself might even prefer not to sue transgressors, in order to be able to go on telling the sheep the conditions are legal and binding.

surely a better example would be lotus tvr noble or any custom kit car car maker as they buy lotus used to use i think a toyota chasis and honda engine in an design with a custom made body. of noble that had a custom engine then a mondeo gearbox etc these companies license the right to use a part on a per model and can use parts from lots of different manufactuers in one car instead of your examples which are tuning houses still partly or wholely owned by the orginal manufacturer

to get back on point surly the best argument in the unfair businesses argument by forcing users to only use they hard ware while selling it on it's only is forcing competition out of the ,arket and creating apple an monopoly on OS X capable hardware :-)

So if a EULA in the US required I voted Republican or I was not legally allowed to use the software, would that be ok?

I am allowed to upgrade the RAM in my Macbook Pro without voiding the warranty - it's one of the few things you are allowed to do without voiding the damn thing. So where does that leave me with the EULA? My ram is a low-latency version made by somebody who is completely unaffiliated with Apple, since OSX needs RAM to run, and I'm using none-apple hardware to run said operating system - does that mean I've broke the EULA, even though Apple have told me I can do that??

I think the EULA is a little extreme - the hackintosh people haven't really done anything wrong - they are using a licensed copy of Leopard, their only crime here is supplying people with hardware to run it on, which Apple see as stealing as it's a lost sale of a full mac... but to be honest, if somebody is doing this it's probably because they wouldn't ever fork out for a full mac anyway!!

Personally - I quite like OSX, but if I had to choose, OSX on the usual PC setup, or Windows/Linux on a Macbook Pro setup - I would choose the macbook pro with windows. Some people will cry at that - personally, I find OSX to have a number of bugs - I've had just as many annoying problems crop up as when I used the Vista beta - and M$ have a harder time making that stable because it can run using any number of hardware configurations. Doesn't mean I'm opposed to OSX, I just don't see it as a million times better than windows. I love the macbook pro hardware though, it's the best laptop I've ever owned, but to be fair it's the most expensive too.

Well, here it is for the record.

I am now, forthwith installing Leopard 10.5.4, on my Armari workstation using VMWare.

To be apple compliant with their EULA, I have acquired a spare apple sticker c/o of the free stickers you get with new iPods, or I did at least with mine. That has been firmly placed on the back of the chassis, I don't want to see it of course. So. Now I have a apple-labeled computer.

By the time you read this, I will have already booted it up, laughed and shut it down down again. Just because i can. It'll cost me a few quid for the license I know, but it'll be worth it for the laugh and the fact that Apple have no way of telling me what the hell I do with what I buy.

Now we need a law which prohibits Linked purchases. At least the French have done something right.

Paris, because she's got no license/usage restrictions on her videos.

So let me get this right...

It's ok for Apple to require that you use their hardware if you're going to use their software.

But it's NOT ok for Microsoft to bundle IE with Windows.

Got it.

What a steaming pile...

Seems to me that Apple is going down the same road IBM went in the late 80's-early 90s. After considerable success, they tied the software to the proprietary hardware (anybody remember Microchannel bus?) and gave the market to Microsoft.

If Apple made the OSX available for any Intel hardware I cared to put it on, I would have replaced all my Windows versions (at retail prices). Microsoft may have had a serious contender.

But no, they prefered to do things in the only way they knew how to. Paris, cause she's a moron too.

<SARCASM>

Section 4. User Requirement, You may buy a copy of my white software in it's white box from my white store; but you must be white to use it. Blacks, Arabs, Africans and Asians are here by banned from our lovely software.

</SARCASM>

As above, you can't just invent your own privilege (private law); All copyright and licensing restrictions are artificially granted by society and if your use of these restrictions hurts society then your ability to restrict will be forfeit.

Apple are clearly selling a product which they artificially limit to their own products.

Here's another one that pushes the Apple monopolist envelope, and which Apple seems less interested in, presumably because the high margin hardware item is a Johnny Come Lately into an already busy marketplace.

I never purchased my iPod Classic. Instead, I had a Creative MuVo, which I had purchased (second hand) off a friend who had the foresight to buy it originally with a transferable extended hardware service contract from the retailer. It failed, one month shy o fthe three year point, presenting the insurer with a dilemma. They could not repair it, tey could not honour the support contract with an identical product replacement, and their margins could in no way justify the full refund fall back option. So I agreed to a 'like for like' replacement, in the form of an iPod Classic. On reflection, I lost out in many ways.

First, Apple audio "quality" isn't. Plain and simple, the 3 year old Creative was better, by a country mile. Second, suddenly I am in the world of DRM'ed hardware. Third, the only 'supported' way to sync this puppy to my huge music collection is iTunes. There's other losses too, and some useless (to me) gains. No radio built in, no ability to modify the playlists on the player itself, etc etc. And I 'gain' the useless ability to view movies (in limited formats) in squint mode on a teeny screen, something I tried once 'cos it was a new gimmick, but certainly of no use to me, especially since the Classic doesn't have (as standard) the ability to play to an external screen.

As a consumer, I like freedom to choose - the iPod offered me only one option for an 'end user experience', a user interface that promises and delivers on its promise. Restricting, or potentially restricting, how tunes I legally own, some of which I have manufactured myself (recored), etc etc and already have a huge existing collection of can be managed, organised, used... Well, up with this I would not put!

But I'd not purchased the device, the EULA was not something I was even aware of when I agreed to the replacement and by opening the box, plugging it in, and seeing that it *required* an interface I've never seen and which I had to install to find out just how cr*p it is.... Where was my recourse? Sure, I could take it back, I could engage in a slanging match with the insurer, and they or Apple would duly pull out said EULA and say "tough".

Google to the rescue, I find MGTEK dopisp, pay a few dollars for it, and my existing music library suddenly works the way *I* want it to.

Does Apple pursue the maker of the software with a flock of lawyers? Not to my knowledge, after all, there's no locked down monopoly on 'upgrade hardware' for the consumer iPod market. Why should there be for the Personal Computer segment? Why should that be any different?

Like many other comments here - I hope Apple lose and the little guy wins, because when that happens, I too will become a winner, as I am more free to choose.

"There are quite a few companies that buy new cars, tart them up, and resell them at a much higher price. Ford don't care, they don't have to deal with the warranty and they sell more cars."

And there's the catch: Psystar are forcing Apple to support Psystar's hardware! They explicitly mention that they provide plain vanilla Leopard media with their hardware, so that means all bug reports will go to *Apple*, not Psystar. Safari will default to... Apple's homepage. Software Update will download from Apple's servers. (Gee, nice of Psystar to let their customers leech off Apple's bandwidth!)

In fact, ALL the support infrastructure in the OS will point to Apple, not Psystar.

Why the hell should Apple be expected to support third-party hardware? They don't build the boxes. They don't train their staff to know how to support them. Their Apple Store staff will doubtless have been told to turn Psystar owners away.

Customers are going to have lousy support from Psystar, because Psystar will simply palm them off to Apple. Nice job. I'd be pissed if I were Apple.

And no, Apple didn't *choose* to switch to Intel. They had no choice! Nobody was making a comparable CPU suitable for their market any more; Motorola completely dropped the ball. Apple are stuck with Intel's 1970s throwback of a CPU instruction set because Intel have spent many decades quietly kicking all their rivals out of their pram while MS got all the public ire.

I think many people fail to understand what MacOS is *for*. Its purpose is to to sell more Macs, that why it's cheap. Apple would make no money by selling MacOS at its current price without the hardware. They might if it was priced more like Vista Professional Extreme Ultimate Edition. And how many would buy then?

Whether the EULA is illegal immoral or both is beside the point.

If Spystar wins this no-one will benefit.

What will happen if Psystar wins this:

Mac OS will be sold for what its worth on its own. It will still come included on Mac hardware, and there might be discount coupons for upgrades. Maybe Apple would even add some software activation scheme like Windows.

Psystar is history, Mac users get to put up with extra hassle, Apple has to allocate resources to implement the hassle.

Nobody wins.

Later on MacOS will no longer work on peecees because Mac hardware will again be special this does not have to be a feature *for* keeping others out, but could be some proprietary technology that serve a real purpose. Remember, Apple now has its own chip company.

"You do realise that Mach was derived from the BSD Unix kernel? The virtual memory subsystem written for Mach even made it back into the BSD mainstream."

A bit of deeper history. Mach 2.x was a hacked BSD kernel. The internal architecture - i.e. process dispatch, interrupts, the core of the kernel, was all straight BSD. Mach 2.6 (for Sun-3 workstations) used a hacked version of the SunOS kernel code. Mach functionality was added via new system calls. Mach 3.0 was a clean slate kernel and had no BSD in it. The BSD functionality was added outside of the kernel. This was part of what micro-kernels were about. Mach 2.x was written as a proof of concept hack up. Mach 3.0 was the main game. 3.0 changed the interface in some important places. The external pager interface changed for instance. Whilst using the BSD kernel allowed the Mach team to get a quick working proof of concept up and running - so they could evaluate the various ideas properly, BSD does not form the basis of the Mach 3.0 or Darwin kernels.

On the main game. There seems to be some astounding armchair lawyering here. Amdhal versus IBM was an anti-trust case - IBM had a Microsoft like monopoly. Nobody went and sued Control Data to get access to NOS. CDC had a tiny sliver of the market. They were not a monopoly. (The fact the Gene Amdhal left IBM to set up a rival might have a little to do with the animosity too.) Apple have 5% of the personal computer market. This is not a monopoly. MS would be hammered if they suddenly introduced a hardware lock-in. Because they would be abusing a market position. Apple are not abusing a market position.

To imagine that MS would sit idly by, and not respond to Apple suddenly competing on home turf is astonishingly naive. Apple may be worth 2/3rds of MS in market cap. But MS could destroy Apple overnight with its usual underhanded trickery if they felt Apple was a threat. Withdrawing Office for Mac from sale would be a good start.

There are companies that have gone the opposite way. Sun Software versus Sun Hardware divisions were a great example. Each a separate company under the Sun Microsystems umbrella. Each told to go and make money. So hardware made (some) stuff that would run any OS, and software made an OS that would run on any hardware. Each trying to make as much as possible. The result being that each damaged the other's market.

Apple could kill this action in so many ways. The next OS version could be a maintenance update available via subscription. And as has been pointed out, Apple can produce explicit hardware compatibility issues.

It's actually quite easy to get Leper (though not Tiger, sadly) running on a PC.

I didn't realise this until I had to get an Intel Mac running in a hurry and stuffed a HD in it (as usual, the HD on a 3 month old Mac failed and WHO wants to loose their computer for a month while Apple UK dick about doing a 2 minute job under their near worthless 'warranty'?).

The HD in question happened to be a PC formatted one with XP already installed (with quite a lot of other stuff).

So, turn it on, hold down the C key, and I didn't realise I'd neglected to insert the Leper DVD until the Mac booted straight into XP...

That got me thinking.

Basically, Apple have shot themselves in the foot here. All you need to do is persuade a PC to load a Mac compatible boot loader on boot up and you get a 'Mac', albeit a Leper Mac, that runs at an amazing speed, and has the distinct advantage of costing a fraction of the price of an Apple Mac.

Obviously, if Pystar make a fight of this - and I for one hope they loose - Apple will ensure that future releases of the OS will be hardware locked to their awful hardware. But, if you want a cheap 'Mac', and can put up with Leper, good luck to you.

The only question the whole thing raises is: How on earth do Apple manage to make their OS run so painfully slowly on their hardware?

Because Leper runs, at a guess, at least twice as fast on a simple Core2Duo 3.2 Ghz with 2Mb as it does on Apple's 3.2 Ghz EIGHT core monster regardless how much RAM you fit it with...

So, WTF are Apple up to?

@ Francis Vaughan

"Apple could kill this action in so many ways. The next OS version could be a maintenance update available via subscription. And as has been pointed out, Apple can produce explicit hardware compatibility issues."

Yes they could, but trading standards would bend them over and make them cry mercy. They'd be fined, and fined big. You know that, I know that, they know that.

@ AC : (Posted Thursday 28th August 2008 05:50 GMT )

You've not heard of VMWare, have you? There's no reason to dual boot.

One thing you don't get:

Apple has nothing against a company that buys an apple computer, mods it and sells it again... remember the ibook tablet pc with touch screen ....

It's more like you buy the Mercedes dashboard WITH MERCEDES LOGO and fit it into a Ford or the Italian Fiat (Fehler In Allen Teilen). Honda? Do they make cars? I thought you called those things lawnmowers, crap on wheels ... ;-)

Apple sell Mac OS X well under-priced so that Apple owners can upgrade their OS cheap.

Now the issue is, that Mac OS X is designed to work on specific hardware, not all hardware, specific hardware. That it might hurt apple if this guy f0cks up, an update that breaks a driver, because he does not have that wifi card with firmware 1.2.2 (special mac version), only 1.2.1 ... for example. He can hurt apple, like all those PackardBell etc that sell pc's with Vista that can't run it properly hurt MS. MS has always lived with it, gosh, MS have had a bad name in computing since MS-DOS times. Even Windows98 bluescreen live on CNN had the Wintards shout as loud as the iTards when Steve shows a new "feature".

Apple are right to say stop here, they are, it would hurt them too much. They could create an el cheapo subsidiary to sell Mac OS X in grey boxes - but design is everything ... don't you pay more for designer chairs, it's still the same plastic!

But Apple will likely lose this one, if this psystar can hold out long enough and it might bury Apple, as the former Mac clones had a contract with Apple, which could be terminated. Here, there is no such thing.

It will hurt Microsoft as well, as I see Dell going ahead and selling Mac OS X on their boxes as soon as psystar wins ... nobody wants Vista and building the next OS on Vista will only give greater bloatware! Apple might end up selling 'a lot of' Mac OS X licenses!

But Apple cannot keep the OS at that price if their hardware sales fall, which they will! They will have to raise the price of the OS ....

Apple and MS are doomed as far as I can see....

tux, because I long for my ubuntu box.

@el reg: I want a sun icon!!!!!

What? Haven't you ever opened up a terminal in Mac OSX?

It says,"Welcome to Darwin!"

Now, google Darwin BSD, or Darwin OS.

It's all open source, except for possibly the GUI(osx I mean),

so I don't think the big deal is the end user loading it...

it's someone making it too easy for the end user :D

Go use Linux anyway. It works now.

Concerning the Sun (software vs. hardware) argument - both parts of Sun are still alive and kicking. Solaris is not only far from dead, it's now the *only* truly free UNIX (it's downloadable, or even available for shipping costs directly from Sun# available for x86/x64 today. Sun still sells SPARC hardware. #And AMD-powered hardware. And even - gasp - Intel-powered hardware.# Sun adding AMD #or even Intel# to their hardware choices didn't kill #or damage# SPARC. The availability of a truly open-source Solaris #http://www.opensolaris.org# hasn't slowed down Solaris #even Solaris for x86) any. Even Microsoft has competition in the Win32 operating-system space - ever heard of ReactOS? In short, the only company still insisting on requiring you to use their software only on their hardware is Apple.

"It really is a cheek of another company to think they can just leverage off the work of others, lazy fucks, why don't they just fund and write an operating system themselves."

Anybody who has seen Connections knows better than to spout nonsense like this. No inventions come from whole cloth; they're either built on the works of others or discovered while studying the physical world.

Stirrups? Added to an existing device, the saddle. Lazy fuck, leveraging off the work of others!

Hey, is Psystar using English in their documention? Lazy fucks, leveraging off the work of others! They should invent their own language and alphabet!

The carburetor? The idea was stolen from a perfume sprayer. Lazy fuck, leveraging off the work of others!

Benz couldn't think of a better name for his automobile, so he named it after his daughter. Lazy fuck, lever... oh, sorry. Forget that last one.

Seriously. If I apply your comment elsewhere I find that Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, Gateway, Acer, Asus, and many others are (or have been) installing -- gasp! -- an operating system that they didn't develop! into their products. It's called "Windows." And a few of those have the infernal gall to actually download Linux for free and install that instead!

This isn't about stealing ideas or software, for that matter, seeing as how they're buying the software (just like the rest of us do). Rather, it's about seeing a market opportunity and being willing to take a chance on defeating Apple's EULA.

Frankly, I'm rooting for Psystar here. I think it's high time software companies stopped writing their own copyright laws. The EULA needs to be taken out and shot.

MHO. YMMV. But stop whinging about lazy fucks leveraging the works of others. It's disingenuous, specious, and hypocritical.