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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.
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.
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.