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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.
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.
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
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)?
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.
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.
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.
But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X?
Yes they did, so if I wanted to buy a copy, I'd pay them for it. We're not talking about warez here, we're talking about the freedom to run software that I've paid for on whatever system I damn well like.
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.
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?
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.
Those opinions you express are not facts. They are, as you accurately phrase it, 'fanboy bullshit'.
Why, so he can throw it while screaming he's going to "fucking kill Apple"?
Oh... Steve Jobs... sorry.
Honest mistake.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
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.
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.
Pystar is distributing them with a purchased license. It's not just a warez copy they're chunking in. The whole crux of the issue is whether the clause that OS X can only be installed on an Apple machine is legally enforceable. Despite having a metric shit-ton of money to throw at this trial, previous legal decisions don't look good for Apple in this case. They're free to sell any software they develop. They're free to sell any hardware as well. To try and artificially lock one to the other when there is no techincal reason to do so just might not fly.
If Toyota developer "SUPERGAS" that got 125 MPG in the new Camry but only sold it at Toyota dealerships and only to Toyota owners (with the explicit instructions that it not be sold to Ford owners), then they'd have a hell of a time legally claiming that somebody couldn't buy it from them and then sell it to owners of modified Mustangs to use. Doesn't matter that they developed the new gas with their cars in mind. Doesn't matter if they claim that you're not allowed to resell it to others. They couldn't legally restrict you from reselling it and using it as you see fit.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
True you should be able to run the software you want on anything; however, it is Apple's right not to support you if you run their software on unapproved systems. While Psystar is installing OS X on non-Apple hardware, where Apple is suing them is that they are also modifying Apple's updates to redistribute. Psystar clones cannot get software updates through Apple.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
"I have never met a single iPhone user who has had extensive use of a smart phone. Most iPhone users probably couldn't even come up with a somewhat accurate definition of a smart phone."
You have a deliberately narrow experience, you implicitly insult everyone who would buy an iPhone, and yet Slashdot readers think you're insightful.
"If a Mac is so superior that it is worth the money involved than people will not buy the clones and they will go under due to the alleged high standards of Apple."
This is exactly what will happen. I own a number of real Apple Macs, but I also own a fancy quad-core 8GB Hackintosh. I can attest that even the most modern Hacktintosh creation (like mine, running an unmolested retail copy of Leopard) is most definitely not as seamless an experience as a real Mac is. I'm not going to get rid of the Hackintosh, but I can say with some authority that the experience is sufficiently inferior to owning a real Mac that I wouldn't put up with it if I didn't enjoy tinkering with PC's.