Psystar Activation Servers Down?

An anonymous reader writes "I purchased Rebel EFI in support of Psystar's crusade back in October. Just 3 short months later, I have no support. I found this out when I upgraded my hard drive and installed Snow Leopard using Rebel EFI. The program can no longer 'phone home' to activate or download/install drivers. This is a direct contradiction to Psystar's promise posted on their website: 'Psystar will continue to support all of its existing customers of hardware and software through this transitional period. Warranties on hardware will continue to be honored as long the customer has a valid warranty. Rebel EFI support for existing customers, as always, will remain exclusively available through email and the built-in ticket interface.' Has anyone else run into this issue? It has been 9 days with no response from Psystar by e-mail or phone."

Comments

Good for you

[RedK]

It seems you needed a lesson in respect of other's hard work. Now you've learned the hard way that it doesn't pay to try and rip off someone.

Speaking seriously though, after the injunction that included RebelEFI, what did you think was going to happen ? Why even purchase a product that requires activation when all it is, is a rip off of an open source product ? I'm betting there's going to be a lot of flames in this discussion.

Re:Good for you

[vadim_t]

Psystar sold PCs, with some software derived from Open Source

Which is perfectly legal. Even the GPL allows selling the software. Got to release the source of course, but you can sell it.

with Apple's upgrade version of their OS, thumbing their nose at the EULA, and argued because you COULD do it, then it SHOULD be legal. How the heck they ever thought that was going to fly I'll never understand. And no it wasn't a "full version" of the OS - you obtain the right to run Mac OS X when you buy a Mac, and at no other time, so unless there was a Mac in the box too (wiped) I don't see how they ever thought it was going to be "OK".

See, that's a legal trick I have absolutely zero respect for.

Apple was getting paid as their software was getting bought -- they just made sure there was no possible legal way to get the software without getting the hardware as well. I bet if Psystar offered to pay Apple extra for the "full version" they'd refuse to take the money. Then when Psystar used the only thing they had available they sued them. It's a dirty tactic. First they refuse the money, then they sue you for not paying them the money they refused to take.

IMO, EULAs in general, and especially the way Apple used theirs in this case should be illegal and void.

Now, that Psystar hypocritically went and added DRM to their stuff is bad as well, but I still think that the crux of what they were trying to do should be legal.

Re:Good for you

[vadim_t]

Actually, during discovery, Psystar failed to produce any proof that they did purchase the copies of OS X they sold. Not to mention everyone of the about 700 PCs they sold was imaged from an imaging server and thus used a single copy (which was unlawful).

That doesn't change my argument though. I believe that the essence of what they were trying to do should be legal.

Now, the imaging server I think was a screwup, and they should have just paid some minimum age kid to install the CD by hand. Though I think that's a technicality anyway, as I fail to see much difference between paying for 700 CDs and installing from each CD, and paying for 700 CDs, and installing from one.

If they didn't actually pay, their bad.

Finally, they were found guilty of copyright infrigment because they made a derivative work (changed Apple's copy protection kext, "Dont Steal MacOS X") which they put on this imaging server, thus engaging in unlawful distribution of an unauthorised derivative work.

If you think about this too much, pretty much every install of Windows is copyright infringement as well. If the shop say, changes the background, that changes something in the registry. That data was created by a MS employee, and MS probably automatically holds copyright on that. So change a Windows setting, sell to customer, copyright infringement.

So maybe you should get the facts about the case before you judge Psystar as some kind of good guy.

I don't see them as a good guy. I think the DRM is shameful, and their plan was flawed, but I still think that creating a hackintosh and selling it should be legal.

Re:Good for you

[RedK]

Really ? First thread on Psystar you post in ?

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1419357&cid=29882459

Search wikipedia for a description of derivative work vs changing settings. I'm done arguing with an obvious troll.

Did you honestly expect anything else?

[halfdan the black]

Did you honestly expect Psystar would honor the 'promise' they made to you when the steal, and re-sell the hard work of the hackintosh community in order to allow you to steal the intellectual property of Apple? The entire company was based on stealing the property of others hard work. Now, what I would have liked to have seen, is Psystar would have worked to improve Linux using some good ideas from OSX. Lets face it, Linux is not perfect, it has sever shortcomings, thats why people pay money for OSX. OSX does several things right, like application deployment (everything packed in a single directory), why not incorporate some of these ideas into Linux? Well, that would require hard work, instead of stealing from others.

Why did anyone support Pystar in the first place?

[Theovon]

When Pystar first brought a machine on the market, it became quickly clear that their hardware was junk and they didn't know what they were doing. IIRC, one early reviewer bought a machine and found that it was unstable because they had OVERCLOCKED IT.

Having experimented (and failed) with overclocking myself, spending lots of time reading and dicussing on forums issues like Vdroop, Vgtl, Vdd, multiplier ratios, etc., etc., I can tell you that running a processor out of spec is challenging because you don't know where in that processor's performance bin you are, and your results are almost guaranteed to be different from someone else's, and Intel Quad cores are notoriously hard to overclock, and well it boils down to more of an art form of experimentation and testing than science because you can't get Intel to tell you the actual characteristics of the chip you bought. And moreover, you can run all the artificial tests you want and still end up with an unreliable system because memtest86 and prime95 don't test all the corner cases and enough combinations of scenarios. (I had run memory and processor tests for a week straight, and everything seemed fine, yet I would get kernel panics while parallel compiling Gentoo packages. I could just never manage to figure out the right combination of Vdd and Vgtl, and I could never for sure rule out the memory system being the source of the errors. So I just decided that I'd rather have a reliable system and longer life than 20% more throughput.)

It's irresponsible for vendors to sell you an overclocked system, because they can't guarantee that it's reliable. Rather, they are fooling you into thinking you're getting a better system than you are, ripping you off in the process. This is just one example of the many incompetent and/or highly questionable things that Pystar was doing that made me want to stay as far away from them as possible.

It would be one thing if this company tried to produce BETTER hardware than Apple. Trouble is, that would require intelligence and discerment, and people with that kind of smarts would also have been smart enough not to screw with Apple directly.

If I wanted to sell knock-off Apple hardware here's how I might go about it:

- Find a way to become an Apple reseller with minimal contractual obligations. This way, you can sell MacOS X discs without raising any major suspicions.
- Sell and support genuine Apple hardware.
- Also sell and support high quality Linux and Windows white-box PCs that just happen to have peripherals compatible with MacOS X.
- Add development support to an open source EFI project
- Let word of mouth get around that your systems are good for running MacOS
- But publically state that you do not provide OS support in this configuration because it may violate Apple's EULA.
- Get your lawyers to make sure you have plausible deniability every way you turn.

All of this requires forethought (or hindsight in my case). Pystar clearly did not have this. (I might not either. I might have just suggested a really bad plan.)

But like I say, the main thing that bothered me about them is that their hardware was crap. It's one thing to ride on Apple's shoulders. Directly supporting OSX but on GOOD hardware is arguably questionable, from a legal standpoint. It's entirely another matter to do incompetent things that could make them look bad. That'll REALLY get them chasing after you.

I've never really understood the whole hacking culture in the first place. People don't want to buy iPhones because they're not hackable enough. Ok, I support Free Software, so I can totally get on board with avoiding something that's proprietary and has DRM and all that. But even if the iPhone were 100% open source, it still would not interest me to hack it. I'm a professional chip designer. I like designing NEW hardware. I like being given an engineering challenge that requires that I create new functionality to serve a market need. I have no desire to confine myself to the spe