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Lawsuit Between Apple and Psystar Moves Toward Settlement

Posted by Soulskill on from the when-life-hands-you-apples dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Psystar and Apple have agreed to alternative dispute resolution to keep the public eye away from their disagreements, and to reduce legal costs. This will eliminate any rulings that would set a precedent over Psystar's claim that Apple is violating anti-trust laws by tying Mac OS X to only their hardware and thus creating a monopoly. This could result in a profit for Psystar's business, but eliminate their line of open-computing Mac-compatible PCs. On the other hand, what's to stop a similar company from doing the same thing?"

2 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. It's nonbinding by HBI · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple can punt on this at any time and haul it back into court if it's not going their way. 'quietly squash' rather than 'publically squash' is the plan. If that doesn't work out, they'll publically squash, because the entire vitality of Apple as a corporation depends on this issue: control of their hardware platforms.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  2. Re:What's to stop Apple? by gnasher719 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If your case is strong enough, you will win. There are a lot of arguments against Apple, especially the anti-trust one. The right to produce a competing product is fairly important in a free market.

    Who says Psystar doesn't have the right to produce a competing product? Apple doesn't deny Psystar's right to a competing product. They just deny Psystar's right to take MacOS X and install it on their computers in clear breach of the EULA, and they have precedent (Xerox' plain paper photocopiers) that even a clear monopoly is under no obligation at all to help its competitors.

    Psystar can compete by installing Windows XP, or Windows Vista, or Linux, or they can buy up the remains of BeOS or AmigaOS. Or write their own operating system from scratch. If they wanted MacOS X, they should have offered more than Apple's $400 million when NeXT was for sale. They can even download Darwin and build a GUI on top of that. It's their business, they should come up with their own ideas to compete.