Apple Offers "Family License" for Jaguar

DietFluffy writes "According to this article, Apple Computer will offer a $199 5-user family license for Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2). The article notes that the family license program depends on an honor system because unlike Microsoft, Apple 'does not put technical barriers in place to prevent people from installing software on more than one machine.'" It's likely that most families would buy only one license anyway, so Apple stands to lose little. Sounds like a smart move to me. (For those keeping score on today's game, that makes it Apple 2, Microsoft 0.)

Comments

Weren't you paying attention?

[jcr]

Right, except this probably means that there will be more anti-copying mechanisms and perhaps a network-aware multiple copies checker.

From the article:

The family license program, to some degree, depends on the honor system. Although legally Mac owners are required to purchase a copy of the operating system for each Mac they own, Apple, unlike Microsoft, does not put technical barriers in place to prevent people from installing software on more than one machine.

Given the fact that Apple likes to put loyal customers into corners focusing on scoring more money on the OS sounds like something they'd do.

Guess again.

-jcr

Re:Weren't you paying attention?

[MoneyT]

First, Apple keeps trying to bundle shit that I don't want. I want email - that's it. That's the sum total of my use for iTools. .Mac is a good value if you want to eat all the shit Jobs is serving for dinner but otherwise you're paying $15 for a plateful of crap and that dinner mint at the end, which is all you really wanted.

Might I then recomend operamail.com or submail.net or even yahoomail? If mail is all you care about, then there's plenty of free stuff arround. If it's the @mac.com part that you want, well, I guess you pay a price then. Just like with websites, if the name means nothing to you, there's plenty of free space out there. If you want a domain though, you pay for it. It sucks, but that's life.

I'm buying a new PowerMac and again Apple has stupid bundling. You *must* buy a DVD playing drive - at least a $100 more than a CD-RW drive would cost. If you buy a second drive that has to play DVDs, too. WTF? I don't
need that functionality and stocking and putting in a CD-RW or a CD-ROM drive isn't hard. So why does Apple insist on making me buy crap I don't want to get the stuff I do want? Aren't their prices high enough without forcing this stuff on their customers?

From pricewatch.com:

16x10x32 CD-RW drive. Lowest price $42

8x DVD ROM Lowest price: $38

12x8x32 + 8x DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. Lowest price: $84

So apple gives you a 16x10x32 + 8x DVD/CD-RW drive, and at worst your paying $42 dollars more than if you bought just the CD RW. Not a bad deal in my book. Seeing as how you know Apple's drives are high quality. But ignore even that fact for a second and consider. What if down the road, you decide you want a DVD drive. So you buy one, stick it in your powermac, and now, you don't have anymore drive bays. They bundle the DVD and the CD-RW because it allows them to get away with 2 drive bays. What else could you want. Who knows, maybe a HD caddy, but the point is, they cover their ass by ensuring you don't have to waste a bay with any other optical media drives. How bout all the poor people who don't even want a burner? Should they be allowed to have a CD ROM only selection? Don't you realize by adding more choices, they raise the price (choices means stocking, stocking means storage, storage means more costs). The bundle makes perfect sense. And when someone hands you a burned DVD with data on it, and all you have is a CD-RW, what will you do then? Complain that apple didn't give you a DVD drive? Think about it.

So I've dedicated myself to giving them as little money as possible.

Good, so on the one hand, bitch about how they don't provide enough options and choices, and then on the other hand, don't give them the money that would allow for choices. Bright move there.

Apple restricts some resellers from selling to new customers even though they are indeed "Apple Certified Resellers".

Where do they do that? Which resellers aren't allowed to sell.

Plus, Linux developers don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for early access to APIs

For the public APIs and the APIs which are opensourse, you don't have to pay for the jaguar ones either. Even some of the private ones, you don't have to pay, the basic ADC membership is free. You do know that right?

For me to discuss Jaguar's APIs I would have to personally know other OS X developers who have the same access as me and privately email them or discuss by phone or face to face. Newsgroups, mailing lists (including Apple's own lists) and any tool of the information age which could allow someone who hasn't signed an NDA with Apple is verboten.

It's the same with any company. If you have acess to their closed source, you can't give that access to the public. It's not underhanded schemes, it's business. If you want to discuss freely, then discuss the opensourced APIs. And no one is forcing you to pay, you choose to do so of your own free will.

I see plenty of good software being developed for OS X. The reason I think you're pissed is because, you're not a student, you're not an educator, you're not a business, you're a hobbyist who doesn't have the money to pay for his access to the closed information, so you're pissed and you want it free. So sad, too bad. It's not good business to opensource your big leverage over the competition. When they can hold you to a NDA, they can reclaim a loss if you decide to leak info. That's why they hold you to and NDA, that's why you pay money. If you don't like it, develop the opensource portions and leave the closed source to the people at Apple and the people willing to pay.

Re:not a plus

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article! "Apple, unlike Microsoft, does not put technical barriers in place to prevent people from installing software on more than one machine." I don't think that's going to change. This offer is great for anyone with more than one Mac system that doesn't want to take the "casual piracy" route.

Re:Nice move by Apple, but...

[SandSpider]

The five machines that Jaguar will be installed on under this license have allready brought money to Apple. I'm sure that they don't like people to pirate their OS, but they surely aren't going to lose sleep if somebody does it. They are, after all, a hardware company.

That's an interesting theory, but economically it only works if developing an Operating System is essentially free. After all, the machines could be years old, so their money is already banked. In order to pay for the OS development, people have to pay for the OS.

Granted, Apple has less risk than Microsoft because Apple sells something other than the Operating System. But it's analogous to saying that Microsoft shouldn't worry about people pirating Office because they've already had to pay for a copy of Windows. Different departments have different budgets and different sources of revenue.

=Brian