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Mac OS X Cracked For PCs Again
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica and The Register are reporting the Apple Kernel 10.4.8 has been cracked using Apple's publicly available source trees. This is the first time Apple was hit by hackers again since Maxxuss silently left the scene.The funny thing about this is the hacker who cracked OSx has released his sources according to APSL. He told Ars Technica in an interview that he did this because he believes in freedom of information, but will this now harm Apple's opensourceness?" From the article: "Unfortunately, free and legal are not necessarily the same thing, and the EULA for OS X requires Mac hardware. However, there is an interesting comment on the blog, one that asserts the requirement of Mac hardware is a "post-sale" restriction. Such a restriction may not be applicable in certain countries, such as those of the European Union. Expect to see what Apple Legal thinks about that shortly."
OS X is a great OS. If more people could try it out, there'd be a lot more converts.
Agile Artisans
daily Apple users are not going to commit themselves to a platform that is just one software update away from suddenly not functioning, or ones for which the apple drivers just don't work. On otherhand for people too cheap to buy apples, and who just want occasional use in an unmaintined state, apple should be happy. It's like throwing a market share bone to the their third pary software developers, and courting future hardware customers. I can imagine that there is sliver of market share for people forced to use apples at work who have a PC at home that just dont have the money to buy an apple YET. I can imagine the hordes of thrird worl countries for whom income levels never will achieve mac status. Neither of these is going to hurt mac sales.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is really not a case of anything being cracked. The source code was available, all this guy did was remove the requirements for particular hardware. Consequently, as we've all known before the gui doesn't work without the checks that were implemented, and you still need something illegal to get it going as an actual OS X install... all you have here is Darwin running out of the same tree as OS X. I'm sure Apple knew this would happen as soon as they released the kernel source.
I think we really need to be careful not to overestimate the influence and power of nerddom. it may be true that a segment of computer users might play with an unsupported version of OS X on their PCs, they do not constitute a significant number of people. You may make the argument that these nerds are the most important constituency, but I do not think they are influential enough to make up for their infinitesimal numbers.
(You see this kind of nerd fallacy all the time. A record company dude just said the other day that the era of the music CD as we know it is dead. It took 2 nanoseconds for nerds to counter: CDs are here to say because of DRM and that their opposition to it was going to halt the migration away from this media in its tracks. Which is of course nonsense. Most people have no idea what DRM is and, until and unless it bites them in the ass, do not care.)
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Give me a break. Porting the Darwin kernel and then running an OS X userland on top of it is not "cracking". It may be in violation of Apple's EULA, but I really don't see any reason to get pushed out of shape about it.
Apple will do whatever they will do in response to it. If they're smart, they're just going to leave it alone: in the end, this really doesn't matter, since people by Macs for the whole package; OS X itself really isn't all that special.
Stuff like this is going to make Apple bring out the big guns when it comes to TPM integration in OS X Leopard. Pro apps like Logic 7 Pro have never been cracked, so Apple's got people who know how to do copyright protection. I suspect once Leopard is out, we'll never hear about "OSx86" again.
"Sufferin' succotash."
So you buy your copy of OS/X and take it home and open the box and suddenly find out that you need to buy a Mac to go with it?
True, but irrelevant. The GP is correct. You cannot buy a copy of Panther for x86, except with a new mac. As a sibling poster said, this situation will change when Leopard is released, but for now everyone running OSX x86 other than on Apple hardware has pinched it. That means that discussions about the legality of hacking it are moot until then.
Wow, so much FUD. "overpriced" even though the Mac Pro is $1,000 less than the equivalent Dell and the new MacBook Pros are also less than the equivalent Dells. You even end with the old "iPod users just want to look cool" canard.
There are many ways Apple can (and probably will) tie OS X to Mac hardware. They've got people who can do it (to date, there has never been a crack for Logic 7 Pro and its USB dongle).
"Sufferin' succotash."
I don't think Apple is ignorant of the interest in running OS X on non-Apple hardware; in fact, I'd say it's a safe bet that somebody in Apple has projections of what the effects on their market share, on their own hardware sales, etc., etc. would be.
But as I've commented in earlier discussions on this topic, I also suspect Apple has projections on just what would happen if they turned Microsoft into a full-blown, no-pretense-of-partnership enemy. Because if Apple ever released OS X for non-Apple Intel hardware, Microsoft would perceive it -- correctly -- as the most serious assault on the Windows platform that they've ever faced. No offense is intended to Linux and *BSD variants by that; it's a simple recognition that OS X has much more "end user" friendliness and a much wider range of commercial applications (including some pretty big name ones) than any other Unix relative ever has, and Apple has one of the highest brand recognitions in the world.
Given how Microsoft has reacted to much less dangerous competition in the past, what do you think their response would be?
Yes, I know you were suggesting Apple could just release an OS X that had only license restrictions and "just happened" to be able to run on non-Apple hardware, nudge nudge wink wink. But if Apple sold enough copies of OS X to non-Mac owners to actually affect their bottom line, that would be enough to attract the attention of the industry press -- and of Microsoft. And at that point, if Apple didn't take very loud definitive actions to put a stop to it, it'd be effectively throwing down the gauntlet just as much as slapping "Now compatible with your Dell, HP and your crappy white box PC!" stickers on every OS X Leopard box.
It's nice to dream, but an OS X that just breezily installs on non-Apple hardware won't happen unless Apple decides they're willing to engage in a fight to the death with Microsoft.
So many comments say things like this and get modded Insightful. Apple doesn't want unmaintained, illegal copies of OSX out there because it weakens Apple's branding. For every person who gets "converted" after downloading a hacked copy of OSX, there's another guy who tries it out, gets some weird driver conflict because he's running non-Apple hardware, and says, "Hey, this thing is just as buggy and confusing as Windows!" And moreover, human nature dictates that people like to bitch more than they like to evangelize, so it's the second guy who's gonna tell all his friends what a piece of crap OSX is.
Of course, show a Windows user or a Mac user that you're running KDE ontop of their sacred OS and it's all suddenly, "Why are you doing that!?".
The same people get really upset and iffy when you aren't using the same office applications, paint programs and so on too. Me? I couldn't careless what people use, I know what I like to use.
Things I can do on Linux that MacOSX and Windows can't:
I wrote a simple script that simply switches between wireless and wired networks automatically without disconnecting any of my existing connections on IRC and so on.
I plug in the Ethernet cable, a script automatically starts and disables wi-fi card, duplicates NIC settings from the wi-fi card (IP address and so on) then brings up Ethernet. My applications just continue running, still connected to servers and such. If I pull out the ethernet cable, Wi-fi starts up, connects to the relevant network (if it's there) and my applications still aren't disconnected from anything.
This is really useful for me when I need to move around, but every now and then, I need to connect to a wired network so I can do network intensive tasks quickly, such as speedy backups, huge file copies, low latency network gaming, conference calling (works fine over wi-fi, but artifacts sometimes occur).
The other thing is, whenever I need to use a scanner, tablet, Bluetooth dongle, wi-fi card -- anything. I can just plug it in, and it works, no need to download drivers, configure the thing. It just works almost instantly. Now, MacOSX? I find a lot of hardware doesn't "just work" on that, if it works at all. I have a Bluetooth dongle that crashes the OS, but works fine on Windows and Linux.
Windows on the other hand.. Always asking me drivers, it rarely finds drivers automatically from the windows update site, the drivers that come on the CD don't work for some reason (designed for XP SP1 and doesn't work on SP2 -- manufacturer's website uses some borked javascript that doesn't let me download the drivers -- BLAH). I just can't use any off-the-shelf equipment immediately with non-linux OSes.
I admit there is definitely hardware that doesn't work with Linux, but so far. I've had far more problems with MacOSX and Windows.
The windows games I can get working under Wine, run often faster than I ever got under Windows on the same hardware -- including some wouldn't even work under Windows on my hardware (second life) -- but worked fine under Wine and Linux (now second life has a Linux port which is even better).
Things I can't do on Linux:
Play every windows game.
Run a program equivalent in functionality to Satscape.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That's the big question. I'm looking at the EULA of my 'Retail box' copy of 10.4, and it says nothing about requiring a valid license from an older version of the Mac OS. Windows 'Upgrade' EULAs state this. They require a legally valid existing license for a prior version of Windows. The OS X license merely states that you must have an 'Apple-labeled' computer; but declines to define 'Apple-labeled'.
I have an old Power Mac G3. I have upgraded the memory, processor, and video card. Yet it is still undeniably 'Apple' hardware. If I remove the original Power Mac G3 motherboard, and insert a motherboard from an Intel Mac mini, replacing the memory, processor, and video card, (but keeping the original hard drive,) it is still Apple hardware, right? My license to have 10.4 on that computer is still valid, right? (After all, the mini came with a valid license as well.) But now I'm running an x86 version of 10.4. If I take the processor and RAM from the mini's motherboard, and put them in a 'generic' x86 motherboard that supports said processors, am I still using Apple hardware? I'm using the same processor as I was before, the same memory, the same hard drive. The only thing that has changed is the motherboard. (Say I wanted a real hardware parallel port or serial port for some reason, or I got a motherboard with a PCI Express slot.) Is my license still legal?
How about if I take the guts of the Power Mac G3, and put them into a generic ATX PC case? It doesn't have an Apple label on the outside, but it's 100% Apple hardware on the inside. Is it 'Apple-labeled'? If so, then what if I follow with the process above, replacing with a Mac mini motherboard, then replacing the Mac mini motherboard. Now, the only Apple-original hardware would be the processor, memory, and hard drive. But I started with completely legal versions of everything. Does mere moving of parts and replacing of parts make the license illegal?
Nowhere does Apple define 'Apple-labeled'.
Apple's OS 9 'retail' license speciically said that you had to install it on a computer that contained an existing legally licensed copy of the Mac OS. Meaning that OS 9's retail box was really an 'upgrade' license.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.