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Apple Believes Someone Is Behind Psystar
rgraham writes "From the article on Growler: 'Apple apparently believes that somebody else is behind Psystar, which might help to explain why a major law firm would take on what seems like a fly-by-night's case; also why Psystar has been so bold in continuing to sell its products. I knew this thing felt funny. As Alice in Wonderland might put it, "It gets interestinger and interestinger."'"
That's all the amended filing is doing is covering all bases by looking for anyone with deep pockets who may be bankrolling Psystar.
Sig this!
It's me. shhh.
"From the article on Growler" ? Rob, you turned on spell check? That coudln't be!
Vista sales weren't very good, maybe Microsoft figured they could make more money selling macs.
MABASPLOOM!
There are lots of PC companies that probably see Windows as a bit of a stumbling block to future sales. Dell has definitely said that it would like to sell machines with OS X. Should a court rule that Apple does not have the right to restrict OS X to its own hardware, that would open the floodgates to major manufacturers including Dell and HP to selling machines with OS X. It's not that hard to imagine one of those companies throwing money at a legally separate LLC/Inc that could bring the issue before a court. Should they [Psystar] loose, small loss. Should they win, those companies get a new product to sell in a market clamoring for Apple stuff.
It can only be Amiga.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It's not unusual to add unknown defendants to an action where all the tortfeasors are not known yet. This is simply a precautionary measure to ensure that Apple can bring a claim for damages against a party unknown to them should, through out the course of the proceedings, it is found that an unnamed defendant arises. By not adding an unknown party, would leave them in a situation where they would have to reinitiate the process from the start. As someone stated earlier it's simply a case of covering all bases.
You know, this sounds really familiar. Oh yeah. Maybe now that SCOX is mostly dead the Microsoft dirty tricks shell corporations (e.g., Baystar) are looking for a new game.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Hmm...maybe that was Darth McBride?!? That would make sense, building a Death...err....Pystar.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
For those who wonder WTF "growler" is, they meant "Greplaw"
And for those who wonder WTF "Greplaw" is, mcgrew meant "Groklaw".
I would think Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony etc. not MS, whose world domination strategy still centers around Windows.
Seriously it could be any one of a number of reasons. Lawyers are like dance hall hookers - you got the money they got the time so the fact a high price firm gets involved means little really.
The size of a company's bank account is usually proportional to their size. High-priced lawyers tend to want lots more money that a small company like Psystar likely has unless they have a puppetmaster.
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Yeah right! Microsoft can't wait till everybody can buy MacOS X for their PC!
And what joy it would be to them if Psystar could invalidate the EULA so that Dell could then ship their PCs with MacOS X!
That's right, Power Computing. They thought they could force their way back into the 3rd party Apple market. And they would have done it, too, if it weren't for those meddling Cupertino lawyers.
The deal is that Compaq reversed engineered IBM's BIOS -- the only part of the design that was a trade secret. Everything else with the PC was very well documented and easily reproduced. The BIOS calls were already well documented. All Compaq needed to do was come up with a fully compatible BIOS without using IBM's code. Compaq came up with workalike BIOS using clean room techniques (or was it Phoenix technologies or some other shop -- I don't remember). I'm sure IBM fought tooth and nail, but they obviously weren't successful.
As for Apple vs. Psystar, it's quite different, the issue is that Psystar is violating Apple's software license agreement (that the OSX software will only be used on Apple-branded hardware). There are software checks in OSX to verify the hardware is Apple's, which means that Psystar would have to patch OSX to bypass those checks, and then distribute the modified code as their own OS.
Had Psystar somehow reverse engineered OSX with clean-room techniques to produce their own fully compatible workalike, this might be a very different case.
Also, copyright laws have changed quite a bit since 1981. I don't know if Compaq would have been able to legally clone the PC with today's laws.
From an earlier Groklaw article:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081019133549359
P.J. definitely has a point here. As such, Apple may have a point in their filing. The question is, how far abstracted from Psystar are the parties that Apple is really looking for?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From the OP, it's actually "curiouser and curiouser" cried Alice, not "interestinger"
Sheesh.
Interesting... pasting from the article (something alien to many slashdotters) apparently makes your comments 'off-topic'.
Requiem for the American Dream
There, fixed that for you.
~Microsoft
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
QUESTION:
Why is it illegal to clone Apple Macintosh computers, but it was not illegal to clone the IBM PC? Why is Apple protected, but IBM was not? What's the distinction?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
QUESTION:
Why is it illegal to clone Apple Macintosh computers, but it was not illegal to clone the IBM PC? Why is Apple protected, but IBM was not? What's the distinction?
Because IBM made the mistake of not getting an exclusive license to DOS.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
QUESTION:
Why is it illegal to clone Apple Macintosh computers, but it was not illegal to clone the IBM PC? Why is Apple protected, but IBM was not? What's the distinction?
ANSWER:
The IBM PC was generic hardware with an operating system owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft didn't have any agreement that precluded them from working with other companies. OSX is an operating system owned by Apple which Apple is not willing to license to other companies.
For those who wonder WTF "growler" is, they meant "Greplaw"
And for those who wonder WTF "Greplaw" is, mcgrew meant "Groklaw".
Personally, I prefer Awklaw and Sedlaw for most of my shell prompt legal needs.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Apple probably hired pystar to create a weak but precedent setting test case they could smash.
More seriously,
one can claim pystar is somehow a good value or something but this takes sheer cognative dissonance since it's impossibly far from the truth.
THat is to say, if you are buying an apple it's either for aethetics, ease of use for grandma or the volunteers at your non-profit, or compatibility, or the relatively low cost of tech support, set up, and training.
Now let's think about this. Does pystar meet any of those features? uh.... No. not one. they are loud, highly idiosyncratic, hard to keep updated, and a support nightmare, and many softwares and hardware devices won't work.
What's the market? cheapness? well certainly not at the low end. And at the high end--well it you want performance and dont care about comptibility then get a PC or a linux machine?
it's the OJ simpson defense: it does not fit.
But Apples implication that it's just a loss leader. Shove anything out the door so you can get a foot in the door makes a lot more sense.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well of course. Here we are trying to have an uninformed discussion based on hearsay and speculation, and he has the outright audacity to bring facts into play!
It's downright un-American, I tell you.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Just don't break the seal and open it up the other way around. Have a toddler / pet kick up the keyboard until the I agree button is pressed, and there you go, no agreements between you and them.
My parrot is now very good at pressing the I agree button :)
I bet Wozniak finally snapped and is doing this out of spite.
Sounds eerily reminiscent of the end of *every bloody Scooby Doo episode* where the baddie turns out to be a supposedly amiable minor character who in reality was bitter about some business dealing and trying to subvert his former partner.
Sad thing is, I almost instantly visualised this in animated form, and I didn't even like Scooby Doo that much!
Woz would have got away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky.... um, lawyers.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The post was modded off-topic because his post had nothing to do with the one he replied to.
He should have left a new comment instead of just automatically replying to the first highly-modded post. This is an abuse of the comment system to get his own comment to appear as high-up on the page as possible. I have mod points and I nearly modded him down myself, but I decided that explaining another modder's motives would be of greater help.
Cloning a PC wouldn't be legal either if IBM hadn't screwed the pooch on getting the first product to market.
First of all, IBM massively underestimated the potential for growth of a microcomputer market. They held the idea that Big Iron was the only true definition of computing, and that things like the Apple ][ were hobbyist toys that would never amount to anything. They made the further mistake of assuming that if a market for 'toy' computers did start to become worthwhile, they'd have plenty of time to develop and ship their own product.
They were wrong in both cases.
When IBM finally decided to sell a PC, they were of the opinion that Apple was 6-12 months from getting a lock on the microcomputer market. If IBM couldn't put a product on the shelves by that time, there wouldn't be much point in trying.
So they tasked an engineer with the job of creating enough of a product to hold a space in the market while the designers put together something really good. Being a good engineer, he did a baseline critical path analysis, and learned that with all the forms, paperwork, and meetings, it would take something like 18 months to ship an empty box with "IBM PC" printed on it. Actually designing a computer to put in the box, shopping for parts suppliers, building an assembly plant, and all those other little details would just push the ship time farther out.
So, faced with the choice between losing a new market entirely or skirting around standard procedures, he proposed a radical plan: design a machine out of off-the-shelf parts, and contract third-party assembly shops to do the construction. That would allow IBM to put a product on the shelves within the 6-12 month deadline, but it would also create an enormous risk: anyone else who wanted to enter the market would be able to do exactly the same thing just as quickly, and just as easily. In fact, it would be even cheaper and easier for the me-too competitors, because they could skip the R&D phase and copy IBM's hardware design more or less verbatim (a process that came to be known as 'cloning').
So they built the whole thing around a chip which could only be sold by IBM: the BIOS.
The BIOS was a computer program burned into ROM. IBM held the copyright on the program, so nobody could legally duplicate that chip. But the BIOS was also tightly integrated with the hardware. Without it, the rest of the computer was just a box of random components. But those components were arranged in such a specific way that it would be hell to try to design a compatible product that wouldn't require IBM's BIOS to run. In one version of the fantasy, IBM wouldn't have to build computers at all, they'd just license BIOS chips to all the other companies that wanted to build hardware.
Then along came a company called Compaq, which reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, and built a legally clean BIOS of their own from the reverse-engineered spec.
IBM sued, and lost. Compaq's legal team had done its homework on maintaining the 'virginity' of the coders who wrote the cloned BIOS.
At THAT point, IBM lost all control of the PC hardware market. And since their OS had also been outsourced to a little company up in Seattle, they didn't have any hooks left in the product.
So in answer to your question: it's legal to clone a PC because IBM was lumbering, stupid, arrogant, in a big hurry, and not thinking very clearly when it spent tons of money pushing a design into the market that could be ganked away from them almost overnight. In the process, they handed half of their market dominance to Microsoft (whose OS became the only thing that made the hardware a 'PC') and the other half to cloners like Compaq.