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Psystar "Definitely Still Shipping" Mac Clones
Preedit writes "Continuing its defiance of Apple, Psystar is reassuring customers that it is "definitely still shipping" its line of Mac clones. And, in a further nose-thumbing at Steve Jobs, Psystar this week said it's now making Leopard restore disks available to its customers, even as Apple insists that Mac clones sold to date be recalled.
In its story on the latest developments, Infoweek is reporting that tiny Psystar apparently has no intention of backing down in its legal dispute with the much larger Apple."
I for one am tired of Apple's Monopolistic business practices on their Mac range.
Where are Psystar getting the money from for all this? Because defending a case of this nature is going to be damn expensive and if they're such a small startup the last thing they want to be doing is spending all their money on legal bills.
...is what I say. It's nice to see the little guy stand up against big buisiness muscle. Apple is beginning to look more and more Microsoft-esque by the week.
I don't think any sane company will break Apple's agreements, licenses on USA soil.
Remember the company shipped "Apple G6 Desktop" and got sued big time? It wasn't based at USA and they weren't trying that hard to get sued. Some media guy browsing Alibaba found the machine, that is all.
For some reason we can't know, Pystar looks like they will be very, very happy if Apple sues them further or this thing becomes more complex.
Would you dare to mess with a gigantic company who even tried to sue State of New York for "Apple" logo? If you dare, would you start your business in USA? Some very big promises/guarantees by very big corporate powers must be given to Pystar. Don't get surprised if there is real IT media left and uncovers it.
Anybody remember when IBM (which was mightier than Apple can ever hope to be) failed at utterly crushing tiny Compaq?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I have to say that I admire their gall. They're paying a rather dangerous game*. Unless they have some really kick ass lawyers who can convince a judge of the unenforcability of Apple's licensing terms, I don't see anything happening except Psystar getting smacked down HARD. As in, take all their assets + punitive damages hard.
Of course, this could be a situation like General Computer Corporation. (The Namco & Atari partner who created Ms. Pac Man.) They were just a bunch of college kids having fun, and they didn't have money anyway. When they got sued, their reaction was: "Cool, we get to go to court!" Sometimes it's nice not having anything to lose.;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...so I think I'm going to buy one of these just to piss them off. Maybe we should all pitch in and buy Steve one for Christmas too.
While it may be shaky grounds to sell these machines as Mac Clones. There should be no reason not to sell those machines with a Linux Equivalent. The nice thing is that you -could- buy a Leopard disk and load it, that is your own choice.
This is no different as my Intel PC that runs Ubuntu, but -could- run Vista if I wanted to.
Load New Commander (Y/N)?
I think Compaq had Microsoft and some part of Government/Corporate scene who is very afraid of IBM monopoly behind them.
Microsoft was allowed to license MS-DOS to _anyone which wants_ from the beginning. It is part of their agreement with IBM and it is why BillG and Ballmer are called "visionary". There is no such thing on OS X. Apple believes in integrated hardware/software combination from the very beginning.
Having reports like "I pressed power button but my Mac slept 10 secs later, it must be broken" is very common on Apple scene. It is nothing on a PC running Windows or Clone OS X.
What those idiots did is also convincing Apple that clones/licensed machines was always a bad idea. They ship JUNK PC.
Apple is stuck retrying a case it won in 1984. Clone makers copying its OS. Apple probably spends 5 times as much on software development as hardware, while the clone makers spend 0.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
If PsyStar were limiting themselves to shipping hardware and bundled unmodified OS X 10.5 retail disks, I really think why would have no legal issues at all. However, by the sound of it, not only are the PsyStar systems running a modified variant of the OS X operating system (including some modifications to get the system running on generic hardware, just like OSX86), but they intend to ship 'Restore disks' that sound suspiciously like modified OS X 10.5 install sets.
That's going to be their downfall in this - the derivative work.
This is a VERY interesting case. Who is Psystar?
Seriously, out of nowhere, a tiny company starts to sell mac clones. It was so sketchy, we on slashdot originally called it a hoax.
Now, they got the guys who beat Apple once before representing them in the fight.
Curiouser and curiouser. It may be an intentionally staged dispute by various oems to create a Mac market for themselves. Vista is not moving boxes, but Mac compatible motherboards may be profitable.
The objective may be Apple's refusal to allow MacOS on non-Mac hardware. If they win, and Apple is not able to enforce this restriction, I can see a whole bunch of clones flooding the market.
It can't be a surprise to Pystar that Apple reacted this way. They must have expected this from the start, and got a legal opionion that they were satisfied with. They must have had their defence strategy planned before Apple even knew they existed.
If Psystar wins, then everybody and their grandmas will be running OSX.
Everybody will win: more folks will run a more secure OS than Windows and Apple will still get all the OS sales.
Most importantly, the fanbois will no longer be special and will find some other shiny, overpriced toy to validate their whiny, shallow, pseudo-intellectual, metrosexual, idiotic existance. They'd probably be much happer(and less whinier) if they spent their hard-earned money at the gay disco instead.
Psystar ships its own flavor of hackintosh... they are not clones. I don't get the persistence of the label. Is it just the desire of folks to have an actual clone as a choice to run OS X that keeps the term active in discussions?
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
How does Apple have a monopoly? They are hardly the only OS or PC vendor on the market. This is like saying that Dell has a monopoly on Dell computers.
I bet it's the size of an office stapler and sounds like a jet plane at takeoff, but still ... maybe the 3G will actually work.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Read TFA, googled a little. It seems like I'm missing something. It seems they simply charge outrageous markup on generic, mediocre Intel systems. Throw in a moderately cheap-looking case and charge $155 for the OS installation. What's new here?
If this was back when Apple was using PowerPC processors, maybe they'd have a point. But I don't see this as being a "clone" of a Mac, because clone implies hardware and this (and the Mac's) hardware is the same as everyone else's.
Compaq did a clean-room implementation of the IBM BIOS. Psystar didn't do a clean-room implementation of OS X.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
BSD developers should start building an OSX clone from some flavor of BSD specifically for Mac Clones like Pystar, plenty of desktop apps out there now for BSD flavors just take a look at PCBSD which uses KDE but other desktop environments would suffice too XFCE is a good one,,,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Or Apple's reputation of "just working" will go down the tubes because they no longer have total control over the hardware.
If Apple starts trying to support every combination of 3rd party hardware out there, OSX will start having reliability problems just like Windows does.
Apple has always held a tight grip on their hardware and software standards. If you don't approve, you don't have to buy their stuff. That is what ~95% (though rapidly decreasing) of people choose to do.
But it is precisely that total control that lets Apple deliver such a relatively high quality product. I'll admit that Leopard is not up to Apple standards... but overall, their products are vastly superior to Windows, despite the huge resources and community working on the Windows environment compared to the Mac world.
The control of hardware and software allows Apple to not have to adapt to the whims of a thousand hardware makers, and it lets them produce a computer like the iPhone (which is mostly just a little Mac), which clearly people love as compared to other "smart" phones. Why do people love it? Because the crushing grip Apple keeps on their standards results in a relatively easy experience for the end-user.
Does this qualify as fanboy bullshit? Why? I'm just saying if you don't like it, don't use it. But the facts speak for themselves. People hate Vista, the average Joe can't/won't figure out linux, and people generally enjoy the Apple experience.
They'd probably be much happer(and less whinier) if they spent their hard-earned money at the gay disco instead.
Disco Stu's workin' pro bono!
It's not so much about monopolies, but perceived monopolies. Most people believe Apple has a monopoly on computers that run osX. Many people believe Apple has a monopoly on computers that will run media editing programs. Far too many people believe Apple has a monopoly on computers that, "just work"(tm).
There's a chance of that, but arguably os/x's driver model is a bit more solid than windows'.
I'd hope for a very solid spec and verification program to keep things as reliable as they are today.
More choice = better. Simple, really.
MP3 Search Engine
Oh come on, the clone makers spent at least a few bucks paying someone to read the osx86 project website...
That reputation may apply to their software, but it doesn't apply to their hardware. Even Apple fans acknowledge that the first generation of almost anything is rather likely to expose some pretty significant flaws that, for some reason, never revealed itself during testing prior to release. I recall the overheating MacBookPro line... That should have been pretty darned obvious. But not every Apple fan acknowledges this... I had a vice president in my company acknowledge that he waited more than 4 hours to get the 3G iPhone and he has been rather disappointed in various aspects of its performance since.
It's the same for the software. Apparently no one thought of testing the procedure of upgrading Tiger to Leopard if you had File Vault enabled - if they had done, they'd have discovered that after the first reboot your home directory becomes unmountable (by Leopard - Tiger can still read it fine).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Even if Psystar somehow manages a court victory that would allow them to purchase and sell copies of OS X installed on generic x86 boxes, all that Apple has to do is stop selling OS X to any retail outlet other than its own. If Psystar can't get legal copies of the software to put on the machines it sells, there isn't any legal way that they can stay in business at that point, other than going to Apple stores and purchasing copies of OS X at full retail price.
We're also heading towards a future of digital distribution. It started with music, has moved to movie rentals, and looks as though it can be expanded to anything in the near future. What's to stop Apple from selling you the newer versions of OS X online? In five years when everyone wants to upgrade to Puma or whatever else they end up calling it, you have the option of downloading the upgrade to your computer instead of having to go out and purchase any physical install media.
Does it really matter if the court rules that Psystar can do whatever they want with a copy of OS X once they already have it if Apple does everything that they possibly can in order to prevent Psystar from ever obtaining a copy of OS X?
Everybody will win: more folks will run a more secure OS than Windows and Apple will still get all the OS sales.
Uhh. OSX is not very secure. IIRC a month or so back a windows, an OSX and a Linux machine were set up and the OSX machine went down first. Even before the Windows machine. OSX is secure cause nobody attacks it. As soon as more people run it you will see its shortcommings.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
More choice = better. Simple, really.
[Citation needed]
I don't like choice WRT Ethernet cables, or WIFI standards, or inter net protocols. I'm happy with IP having the monopoly of the internet.
Aside from that, Apple has no right to say what other manufacturer can build.
Of course, they can refuse to support OSX outside of Apple computers, that's their business choice.
Or perhaps Apple will simply continue supporting the hardware it does, while other companies support the hardware that they sell OS X on, and Apple will be forced to lower its over-the-top hardware prices in order to compete with other OS X machines.
It's an entirely different case. In the case you cited, Formula were distributing a hacked copy of the Apple II software without a license. In the Pystar case, Pystar are buying a copy of OS X from Apple for every computer they sell. Apple are getting their $129 for every sale.
The first case is pure copyright infringement - you can't just take a copy of someone else's copyright work and distribute (modified or unmodified) copies without falling foul of copyright law.
The second case is about violation of the EULA. If copyright law regards installing, modifying, and running a computer program as non-infringing use (which it ought to, since a computer program you can't do any of this with is pretty useless) then a EULA is invalid because you don't need any rights from the copyright holder than copyright law grants. More likely, given the broken state of IP law in the US, it will be found that you do need to agree to a license, but whether the terms imposed by Apple are legal remains to be seen.
In the worst case, Apple will win on the basis that their EULA prevents this. In the best case, Apple will lose because EULAs are not required for computer software and this will set a precedent that no EULA is valid (distribution licenses, like any Free Software license, would be unaffected since these grant you rights beyond what copyright law gives). In the middle case, the validity of EULAs in general will be upheld but the restrictions in question (no installing it on non-Apple hardware) will be deemed unreasonable and unenforceable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As I understand it, they are not actually pirating OS X, they merely install retail copies of Apple OS on unblessed hardware, albeit breaking the TOS.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Psystar is going to win this as long as Apple sells their OS as a boxed product.
Insisting that Apple's separately sold software has to be run on Apple's hardware is an unenforceable and illegal tying arrangement under US antitrust law. This exact issue has come up before in 734 F.2d 1336 DIGIDYNE CORP. v. DATA GENERAL.. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled: The issue presented for review is whether Data General's refusal to license its NOVA operating system software except to purchasers of its NOVA central processing units (CPUs) is an unlawful tying arrangement under section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1 (1976) and section 3 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 14 (1976). We conclude that it is.
That's clear enough.
In antitrust tying cases, it's very unusual for a tying provision in a contract to be found legally enforceable. A more common situation is that some victim of a tying arrangement wants a court to compel the company in a monopoly position to do something, like sell them spare parts. Even then, the tying company usually loses.
While your right that Psystar is violating the EULA and that its not clear if the EULA is enforceable I do not believe that is the core of Apples case (mostly because they don't want to find out that their EULA is unenforceable).
I believe they are suing because Psystar modified and redistributed the software updates from apple which is a violation of copyright law. Apple didn't sue them when they first shipped units with OS X installed they waited until they had distributed a modified software update for just this reason.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Why does Apple do things this way?
This is my own musing on the subject - MS did the smart thing in just making software and letting people install it on whoever's hardware. This allowed dozens of companies to create systems for Windows to run. i think that was a big part of what allowed Windows to become dominant (more than the anti-competitive stuff they did later). Wouldn't the MacOS run on more machines if there was competition in the market to build hardware to run it? If Psystar can build less expensive and less queefy looking boxes, Apple might lose money on hardware but sell more copies of the OS. Part of the fun of playing in Windows world is that i've got dozens of vendors that can sell me an assemble system, or i can buy the parts from hundreds of vendors/manufacturers and build it myself. That's another thing Apple seemed to miss.... The MS model created entirely new industries. Apple spawned a few companies that make things for hte iPod, but that's about it. From a previous /. conversation i learned that it is possible to home brew a mac, but it's very difficult and few people have the knowledge to do it.
Could someone more familiar with the history post on why they this is their business model?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
That's a really interesting point. So had the IBM PC come out today, no one would be able to copy it, the phrase "IBM compatible" would never be coined, and the PC revolution wouldn't have happened, or would happen MUCH more slowly. I think this a wonderful gedanken experiment for how patents (in their current form) actually stifle, rather than promote innovation.
Yeah, the verb tenses are a little confused, but you know what I mean.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Apple are getting their $129 for every sale.
But Apple has set that price point with the restriction of "must be run on Apple-branded hardware". Who's to say the price wouldn't be $478 for a non-Apple-hardware license? Think of it as an "upgrade price" for people who already bought something else from the manufacturer.
Apple has chosen not to release a version of the OS without the hardware restriction, and I'm open to debate about whether or not they should, or whether or not the EULA is enforceable. But it's disingenuous to suggest that $129 is fair compensation just because there is some version of the software license available for that price, particularly when the retail price of Windows is more like $250.
How can they run Apple out of business? Firstly, most Apple sales are iPods, then laptops, and Psystar aren't selling anything in either of these markets. Secondly they are bundling a retail copy of OS X with every Mac clone they sell. Apple is getting $129 for every Psystar sale. This isn't like the authorised clone makers, where they were getting MacOS 7 very cheaply, they're paying the full retail price for every machine shipped.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They do have a right to say that upgrade-only versions of their OS are not sold as full versions.
No, they have to retry the Compaq case. And IBM lost that one.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
We went through this with cars. The manufacturers, who had just as deep of pockets and just as many or more of lawyers as apple could possibly throw at this situation wanted to make it so you could only get and install bloated price OEM parts to go on their cars. They lost in court and now you can go to the parts store and get a variety of parts that don't come from the major manufactuers and have their stamp on them, but they will fit into place and work. You can get out your welder and mix and match for that matter, if you want a belchfire motor and an Acme transmission in a roadhog chassis, it is legal to do so. IOW you can get 50 buck starters that work just as good as the original 150 buck starters. Or engines or what have you. And they can't insist you only burn "their" brand of gasoline either, nor can the gasoline company insist you can only put it into approved brand cars. So there's your car analogy, hardware is the cars, software is the gasoline.
Now the car parts clone makers can't claim they are the original manufacturer, but they can still do it and the consumer is obviously better off by a wide margin. Apple is out to lunch, hope it makes it to the supreme court.
With that said, I don't want either a mac clone nor OSX, Linux works just fine on generic commodity hardware if you do just a bit of homework before you buy components or systems. But the *principle* is important. And if Apple throws a hissy fit about patents, that needs to go to the supreme court as well as to why if they can get a patent there is no warranty as to being suitable for purpose for software. That is such a blatantly glaring ripoff to the end user consumer it ain't funny. One or the other for software, copyright or a patent, but not both.
The law should not care about apple's (or anyone else's) buiseness model. It should just care about providing a framework for a competitive market.
In my opinion, any license provision which enforces vertical integration should be unenforcable. I have not read TFA (hey, this is slashdot!), so I'll make a generic example. Let's say apple sells an operating system. It also sells computers with the os preinstalled. Let's say somebody else starts buying the operating system from apple, buying hardware from somewhere else, and selling the hardware with the operating system preinstalled. First sale doctrine should allow this. The assertion that the software is licensed rather than sold shouldn't in my non-lawyer opinion hold in court, since there are no recurring payments.
This is good for competition because it would force apple to have their hardware be competitively priced. Of course, if their hardware has a high cool factor (like the macbook air, or the iphone) and people are willing to pay extra for that, that doesn't mean it has to be cheap.
Windows may have some pretty severe reliability problems. However, I haven't had any problems with hardware drivers since the Win9x days. Hardware drivers are not a major source of Windows' reliability problems.
There isn't a terribly wide selection of hardware currently in production that isn't already supported by OS X. We already have good drivers for Intel chipsets, ATI and nVidia graphics, and most commonly-used networking controllers.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
IBM doesn't sell PCs anymore, so ultimately, it didn't really work out for them.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Or Apple's reputation of "just working" will go down the tubes because they no longer have total control over the hardware.
This argument is ridiculous. People who buy a Mac clone won't blame system problems on Apple if Apple hardware doesn't suffer from the same ailment.
The only problem with Apple's reputation is that we can't trust them anymore because the company is over 30 years old.
From their website: "This utility will allow your Open Computer to boot from the native Leopard installation DVD" - Pystar Restore disk That "utility" sounds like EFI emulation. Can I get an amen?
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
Why is it insightful to stereotype Mac users (or even specifically the fanboys) as whiny, shallow, pseudo-intellectual, metrosexual, idiotic, and gay?
I've played with a MacBook Air for a couple days, and was really unimpressed by its performance in every aspect aside from battery life and weight.
Actually, that is the point of the MacBook Air.
Buying a MacBook Air for performance is like buying one of those Smart Cars for towing capacity. The MacBook Air is about portability and designed for road warriors who want something lightweight that can do most things. The performance is okay as it was intended to be better than most sub-notebooks but not as good as regular notebooks. If you want performance, that's a MacBook Pro. For more general needs, that's a MacBook.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's fair compensation because it's what Apple charges.
If they want more money, they should charge more.
A seller's intent does not enter into it. My local grocery store sells peaches for about 50 cents each, intending that they be eaten. If I buy a peach for 50 cents and instead use that peach in some mysterious way to create an invention which makes me millions of dollars, that in no way entitles the local grocery store to any more than their original 50 cents, nor does it make the situation in any way unfair to them.
Apple sets their price with the assumption that buyers will be using the product on Apple hardware. If that assumption gets broken, that's Apple's problem for making it, not the buyer's fault for breaking it.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
would you then be able to sell the modified copy
Sure, it's the right of first sale. Can I re-sell a textbook that I've underlined, annotated, crossed words out, drawn diagrams, erased diagrams, etc..? Sure. It's up to the buyer to verify that he's buying what he thinks he's buying. If he wants a pristine unmodified copy of a book, he needs to verify that before he purchases. If the buyer asks me if it's unmodified, and I lie, then it's fraud. But if I say "yes it's been modified" then it's caveat emptor -- buyer beware...
Or Apple's reputation of "just working" will go down the tubes because they no longer have total control over the hardware.
I predict in 2012, we'll see the OSX BSOD projected on the ceiling at the Olympics.
Except, knowing Apple, it will be fuchsia instead blue.
However, MS only makes a release of Windows every 5 years, so they charge a lot for it. Apple on the other hand, has a new version of OSX every 2 years. So, in order to make it more enticing for buyers to buy new versions so frequently, they made it cost less per version.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Yep...and the big loser was IBM, who was trying to dominate the PC market with their hardware and an OS that they had neglected to control because they did not understand the importance of software. When people figured out that you did not have to buy a box from IBM to run DOS (or later, Windows), the PC became a mere commodity, prices dropped, and we all benefited (except for IBM, of course).
Apple saw this, and avoided IBM's fate by tying its OS closely to it hardware: Macs were built on Motorola CPUs, and had a proprietary architecture; MacOS would only run on that architecture. Apple had chosen not to go head with Microsoft as a software company, and continued to survive primarily as a hardware company. When someone tried to clone that hardware without permission (and permission wasn't forthcoming expect for a short interval when Apple flirted with licensing), Apple went after them for patent infringement.
However, all that changed when Apple adopted what is essentially the generic Wintel hardware architecture: now the only thing that prevents people from building boxes that run Apple's OS is the EULA under which the OS is sold. That is a much weaker position than Apple was in previously. You don't have to break any patent laws to build a "Mac Clone"—there's nothing proprietary about the hardware platform any more. (You do have to be careful to include only hardware that the OS supports, of course.) As others have pointed out, tying software to a particular brand of hardware may very well be in violation of US anti-trust law.
It also seems to me that the morality of Apple's position has been undermined. There is nothing special or innovative about today's Macs, except maybe the stylish cases. Yet, Apple sells these boxes for a considerable mark-up—and insists that we can only run their OS on boxes that carry their logo. In the PC business, at least, Apple has ceased being an innovator and is merely capitalizing on their historic prestige and slick marketing.
Question: I understand there are some provisions in the Apple OS that keep it from running on a generic PC platform. Can someone tell me exactly what those provisions are, and what has to be done to circumvent them? —No, I'm not planning to build myself a Mac, I'm just curious if getting around Apple's safeguards involves actions that might themselves break laws, for example re-writing any part of the OS could conceivably be a copyright infringement, right?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
OS X supports quite nearly as much hardware as Windows. It's a matter of getting good drivers written.
There's a conflicting statement if I ever saw one. It supports nearly as much hardware as Windows, but the drivers don't exist. That would imply that it doesn't support the hardware.
If Apple starts trying to support every combination of 3rd party hardware out there, OSX will start having reliability problems just like Windows does.
The maybe Apple should go back to non-x86 hardware. I've been reading the stories, I know, the nerve of me RTFA and more, and I'm not sure myself, but this is really looking like a right of first sale type case opposed to copyright. Psystar is purchasing a copy of the OS, it is now theirs to do with as they please (with the standard limitations of unauthorised distribution). They are not making copies of the OS, installing and distributing an unlicensed copy, they are installing a valid, purchased OS and passing their right of first sale onto their customer. It will be an interesting case to watch unfold.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
If what they are selling works as a full version, that's kind of like saying "you can't use this freezer we're selling you to store meat, just to make ice cubes." Once the hardware leaves Apples hands, why do they have any right to say what can and cannot be done with it? They don't own it. Now if Apple just LEASED all their hardware, that'd be a completely different story.
This is seriously not a big deal for Apple. If they lose in court, they will simply start selling their OS as an upgrade. And since the only way to get an "upgradable" MacOS computer will be through Apple, Psystar's business model will fail because they will not be able to claim first-sale principle. (Assuming the idea of upgrades does not get tossed, but that probably will not)
Of course, if Apple does lose, the case may change the shape of the computer industry because of implications for the EULA.
Cheers,
m
Apple doesn't get special privileges because it "only" holds a smaller percentage of the hundreds of millions of computer sales out there. Their computers are overpriced and they need competition.
I am confused. You state that Apple has a small market share, but doesn't have enough competition. It would seem to me that the other 85% of the market might provide it some competition. For example, there's this OS called windows, perhaps you've heard of it? I've heard it's pretty popular, and some people apparently choose it instead of OS X.
To be fair, lots of hardware vendors have various sorts of problems. I've certainly seen laptops from Dell and Compaq that have weird problem (crashing when you plug in peripherals, random reboots, etc.) that were caused by hardware defects and design flaws (which were admitted by their tech support). The two things that have gained Apple a particular reputation are:
I mean, when you're getting lots of customer complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a bad product. Sometimes it means that your customers have very high expectations. I myself have bought multiple first-gen Apple products (including the Macbook Pro and iPhone) and haven't found the failure rate to be particularly out of line with other companies. Sure, that's just anecdotal evidence, but I worked helpdesk jobs for years, including supporting Dell, HP, and Apple products, so I don't think my anecdotal evidence is completely worthless. And one of the things I learned during that time was that all hardware vendors will sell you an occasional lemon. The good vendors are the ones who will fix or replace that lemon without too much hassle.
I like rooting for the underdog, or the little guy as much as the next slashdotter, but spending more money on an unlicensed, unsupported clone running a closed source operating system is just plain stupid from a security standpoint.
Apple already sucks at delivering patches in a timely fashion (bind, anyone?), they're certainly not going to go out of their way to ensure their patches are installable on Pystar machines.
So while the idea of saying up yours to EULAs and non-enforcable clauses and arguing that point in court is entertaining, and tickles my "aww neat" spot, spending money on an unmaintainable, closed source, hacked, unlicensed piece of crap does not.
Also, I doubt Pystar did all the work to get OS X on their boxes. I can't vouch for this but I would not be surprised if they were simply making you pay for the stuff from osx86, which is even worse, in my book.
Bottom line, running a Hackintosh should probably be restricted to the hacking lab, or entertainement value, or for quick and dirty testing, not production use -- which is not what Pystar is implying.
So that's sad, but I probably won't shed any e-tears when Pystar crashes and burns.
I love how on newegg, etc, "Apple" hard drives are a separate section, and they cost a LOT more
Can you post some links? I just checked the "External Harddrives" and "Mac Harddrives" listings, filtering for Western Digital, and all the they didn't have any of the same models in both categories. The notable difference is that most of the non-Mac drives had just USB 2.0, whereas most of the Mac drives had USB 2.0, 1394a, 1394b, and eSATA. So if you can find a drive listed under both the "Mac Harddrives" and "External Harddrives" sections and is more expensive in the Mac listing, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see it.
IIRC a month or so back a windows, an OSX and a Linux machine were set up and the OSX machine went down first. Even before the Windows machine. OSX is secure cause nobody attacks it. As soon as more people run it you will see its shortcommings.
Not to burst your bubble, but that was when the attackers had physical access... As far as I'm concerned, if someone has physical access to your box, you're already screwed.
The real litigious bastards...
The first case is pure copyright infringement - you can't just take a copy of someone else's copyright work and distribute (modified or unmodified) copies without falling foul of copyright law.
Yes, but you also can't take a copy of someone else's copyrighted work, make a modified copy, and then sell both the original and modified copy for the price of the original copy-- which is exactly what Psystar is doing in selling OSX pre-installed on their machines.
The thing is, it's not clear to me that the case hinges on the EULA. It clearly would if this were a case of Apple suing end-users who were installing OSX (after buying a copy) on non-Apple hardware. However, this is a case of a company selling (essentially) the OSX installation. So they are making a copy (to the hard drive) and then selling that copy. IANAL, but it seems like that's copying/distribution of copyrighted work without a license to do so. Seems like outright copyright infringement to me.
On the other hand, this "restore disk" may be an end-run around all that. If they stop offering pre-installation and sell you the hardware, a copy of OSX, and a restore disk that installs/patches OSX, then I don't see how Apple could sue them for copyright infringement. Unless, of course, this falls under some DMCA sort of thing where they'll be in trouble for providing a means to circumvent copy controls.
But then, if they go through all the trouble of creating a "restore disk", then I'm not sure what would stop people from pirating that restore disk and using it to install OSX on some other hardware vendor's product. It would be pretty ironic if they tried to use copy protection and copyright law to protect their restore disk.
Really? Because I can't help but suspect you would scream bloody murder at a company that was modifying and redistributing GPL software for money and not following the terms of the license. After all, they paid the requested price ($0) and now they should be able to do what they want with it, right? No, because the price was actually $0 + agreement to the terms of the license. Apple is not charging $130 for OSX. They are charging $130 + agreement to the terms of the license.
If you are not happy with the restrictions of the GPL license you are free to contact the copyright holder and, if they are agreeable, negotiate a different license. And if they are not agreeable you are SOL.
If you are not happy with the restrictions of the Apple license you are free to contact the copyright holder and, if they are agreeable, negotiate a different license. And if they are not agreeable you are SOL.
Weren't about 30% of Vista crashes in 2007 due to nVidia drivers? Looks like almost 50% when you add in Intel and Ati. source
Wouldn't THAT be something to think about?
you still have a choice of wifi manufacturers, ethernet cable manufacturers and implementors of internet protocols, I think you are confusing standardization and monopolization, they're two entirely unrelated concepts.
MP3 Search Engine
I'm not sure if this is the competition you're referring to:
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/03/28/os-x-first-os-to-be-hacked-in-pwn-2-own-contest/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mac-OS-X-Hacked-Vista-SP1-Hacked-Ubuntu-Linux-Survives-Unscathed-82079.shtml
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39375171,00.htm
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9906001-37.html
On day two things turned around when contests were allowed to instruct contest organizers to visit a web page or open an email. Within two minutes Miller had prepared his exploit code and instructed organizers to visit a web site. Game over. Miller had seized control of the MacBook Air and landed himself a nice prize, seemingly using a hole in Safari as contestants were only permitted to take advantage of preinstalled software.
The attackers didn't have direct physical access so much as taking advantage of the weakest element of security, the user.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
The GPL is not a license for how you can use the software, but rather a license for how you can further distribute the software. The law says you can't distribute copies without permission. The GPL is that permission. It's a completely different thing, despite the superficial similarities.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
CP/M, not DR DOS.
DR DOS was Digital Research's MS DOS clone and was derived, at some level, from DOS Plus, which in turn was derived from CP/M.
And, of course, MS DOS was derived from MS DOS 1.0 (it's worth calling that an entirely different operating system, it doesn't have much in common with MS DOS 2.x onwards), which was a rebadged/bug fixed QDOS (not related to the QL operating system), which was a clone of CP/M intended for 8086 processors designed because Digital Research wouldn't prioritize their own port of the OS.
It's a messy relationship ;)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The issue is the software. PsyStar is buying copies of Leopard that are labeled "to be used on Apple-branded computers only". Since the Apple-branded computers already come with an OS license, the retail copies of the OS are effectively upgrades to the version already on a Mac. However, PsyStar is selling those copies preinstalled on machines that do not have licenses from Apple.
PsyStar might be able to argue that, but it'd be a technicality. It might work for the copies PsyStar has already bought, but Apple would overcome it by issuing all new retail upgrades with "Upgrade Only" all over the box, disks, and manuals.
The "to be installed on Apple-branded computers only" line means it really is just an upgrade license, because those Apple-branded computers already have some earlier versions of the OS licensed. The PsyStar boxes don't.
Now, there's also the illegal tying route that PsyStar might argue, and a few other things probably as well.
I kind of hope Apple loses this one, but I wouldn't at all put money on that outcome.
So then it's Apple's problem to not sell it to them. Again, once the software is legally purchased, there's no signature or contract saying that it CAN'T be used for this purpose.
It all boils down to the effectiveness of "inherent agreements" or EULA's...which, in my opinion, is (and should be) nil.
And who'd guess that american trademark law requires trademark holders to act defensively of their trademarks or risk losing them?
what a funny little world we live in, although it's been nice to see the number of people who think this is about selling hardware that is compatible with running a boxed copy of OSX (which, for interest sake isn't what pystar is doing anyway - the added bonus is that the pystart units barely function for what they are said to do and have some interesting hacks to a burn copy of the install disc to get osx running on the machines at all.)
....Their computers are overpriced and they need competition....
They have plenty of competition in the hardware as such, but are the only ones that write their own operating system. Anybody that wishes can also write their own operating system. There are no laws to stop that are there? Why should Apple not do everything they possibly can to NOT supply their operating system to other hardware makers? They are not like Microsoft, selling their software on the open market to all comers are they? If they did sell their software to all comers, then they would also have to support everybody or at least the hardware manufacturers would have to support OSX with decent drivers for their hardware.
What right does anyone have too complained about not being able to buy a certain product from its manufacturer? Can Apple be compelled to sell their OS to some other manufacturer who wants a copy to use in their own product?
All theory is gray
Why is it insightful to stereotype Mac users (or even specifically the fanboys) as whiny, shallow, pseudo-intellectual, metrosexual, idiotic, and gay?
You sir need to spend more than 10 minutes in the presence of Apple fanbois.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"The derived work argument is difficult to support."
It is not, because the law is very clear about it.
" you bought a copy of my book and replaced a page with one containing some better description, would you then be able to sell the modified copy?"
You would be entitled to sell _that_ copy because doing so would be a clear transference of ownership (you would not have your own copy anymore). You could not however make one or more copies of your altered version and distribute them, even if you included a legitimate original copy with them, because selling a legitimate copy does not give you the right to distribute a non-legitimate copy.
"Unfortunately, there was a case last year related to DVD censorship that might have set a relevant precedent here, where a manufacturer was selling DVDs edited to remove certain portions along with a copy of the original."
It didn't set any precedent, but was a clear case of ruling based on what copyright law says. First sale doctrine (which is enshrined in copyright law through fair use provisions) lets you do pretty much what you like with stuff you buy _within the law_, and in the case of copyrighted materials, the laws you have to be within say that you can make archival copies and derived works for your own purposes, but are prohibited from distributing them to third parties. The text of the act clearly says that any copies apart from the original _must be destroyed_ when transferring ownership to somebody else -- there is no provision for transferring ownership of any other copy except the original to a third party under any circumstances.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.