Hell, it doesn't even use DRM - the OS X install disk is completely unprotected, has no serial numbers, activation codes, online activation or anything of the sort.
There's a trivial plaintext bit you need to remove called (not kidding) "Don't Steal OS X.kext" or something similar from the image which allows you to make your hackintosh.
And you should also read the book US vs MS - the rules are literally different for a monopoly leveraging its position to gain market share - eg, an OS monopoly being used to gain and maintain a browser monopoly.
The statement is not at all false, let alone "totally".
Fine if they changed their minds afterwards, but what actually happened was akin to:
Psystar: I'll have 10,000 copies of OS X please!
Apple : Sure, that will be 10,000 x $29 please... these are for use on Apple hardware right?
Pystar: Of course!
Apple: ok then, thanks for shopping at Apple!
Psystar: Sweet, 10,000 copies of OS X to install on PCs!
Apple: Hey! Quit it!
It's not like they didn't know ahead of time that the licence didn't allow use on non-Apple hardware.
Ford isn't going to care if you, as a hobbyist, buys parts from Ford to use in a Chevy. It probably will care if a business starts up that sells Ford parts for use in Chevy cars, especially if any of Ford's brands are involved on those products - like Mustang-branded seats or similar.
It's just there. It's not used by OS X, and is not present on all Macs (in a forward production fashion - ie, some older ones have it, some newer ones don't), so it's clearly not part of a "TPM strategy".
It's probably just hardware that come along for the ride when the logic board was designed - ie, it was part of some standard chipset Apple used. It may have been part of a strategy that was subsequently abandoned (for the iTunes store for example), if Apple wanted bargaining chips with the movie and music industries.
We'll never really know, but any TPM hardware on a Mac is not used by the OS for that purpose.
If they sold a "ready to go hackintosh, just follow these steps" with a sealed copy of OS X then there's really nothing Apple could do about that - the copy of OS X might be being sold for use on an Apple machine, maybe not, but the decision is a user one, not Pystar's at that point.
Because the user licence that comes with OS X prevents you from doing that.
Technically Apple could come after you for your 1 hackintosh box that you have for personal use but it choses not to (at least so far, but signs so far seem to suggest that they really don't care about homebrew).
What they *do* care *very much* about is people selling them on as ready made PCs with OS X installed, and you're right, there is no technical difference between the guy who does it to one machine for himself and the guy who does it to a hundred machines and sells them to his friends, but it's entirely up to Apple who it goes after for licence violations. It's not like a trademark issue where you must defend any breach or you risk losing the mark - they will probably have an economic vs brand protection chart where "personal use" becomes "hackintosh vendor" and you become a target.
Make no mistake though, you are always a target if you make a hackintosh - they just leave you alone because you're no threat to their business model. The NFL won't care if you tape the game, but it will care if you then sell that tape on ebay.
Ok, ok, bad analogy, the NFL will care very deeply if you tape the game and will froth and foam and rage about home taping taking the food out of the starving mouths of NFL players' children, but you see my point.
And if you can't see that the two are both legally protected licences, then you should be moderated down accordingly.
The point is not that the two are equal, just that they are both enforceable by law, and a conscious decision to ignore one of them harms the other.
The law preventing me from stealing a car is very different from the one that prevents me obtaining that car via fraudulent means, but both of them are laws that will get me in trouble. If I think it's ok to obtain property by fraud, even though it's illegal then the guy next door to me can go and steal a car directly and claim that he also ended up with a car, so what's the big deal.
There *have* been cases that have tested EULAs in court, and while the rulings have not set a general precedent in the US, in general a EULA will stand up.
I never equated the GPL and a EULA in anything but contract terms: ie, a set of conditions that apply to a piece of software you want to use.
"Deliberately breaking their own software for no other reason than greed (eg, DRM in WMP, deliberate crippling of the "Home" edition of XP for no technical reason is not anticompetitive, it's just silly."
Where I said it was ok of MS to do that, it was just a silly business idea.
And monopolies per se are ok - it;s when you use that monopoly to exploit another business area when the line is crossed.
There is no difference between them - you just don;t want to equate the "godly" GPL, designed to protect freedom with "nasty" EULAs, but the principle is exactly the same: the software comes with a set of conditions (legally protected and enforceable conditions) for its use. The GPL is one variant of that, a EULA is another.
The GPL takes away my right to do certain things too - whether you think those rights are taken away for a good reason or not, they are restrictions on what you can do with GPL protected software. (I happen to agree wholly with the GPL and its goals, but I am illustrating a point).
You cannot have it both ways - trying to find a way to make it ok to break Apple's licence by defining it differently just won't cut it. You either respect licence conditions or you don't. If you don;t agree to Apple's conditions then don't buy the software.
I think I have compromised enough by having to write "sulfur hexafluoride", which is a terrible misspelling, but the common wy you see sulphur spelled nowadays.
It depends what they are doing - intentional breaking like the mangling of Java so that the dominant form would be IE at the expense of the real standard *is* anti-competitve, since it was designed to ensure that IE would maintain the browser market.
Deliberately breaking their own software for no other reason than greed (eg, DRM in WMP, deliberate crippling of the "Home" edition of XP for no technical reason is not anticompetitive, it's just silly.
And yes, that holds true - you can't be anti-competitive with yourself, but you can use your monopoly share in one market to force someone else out of business by breaking their standard on purpose.
The licence for OS X says "only to be used on Apple hardware" and if you want to stay true to that licence, you cannot make a business model out of selling machines with OS X preinstalled that clearly break the licence.
If you think "well, the licence should be ignored" then sure, as long as the GPL can also be ignored at will, or any other software licence for that matter.
Vertical integration is not illegal, and it does not harm any competitor if Apple choses to go after a company breaking its licence to OS X (other than the company in breach of the licence of course).
Apple hasn't gone after individual hackintosh creators, but it is well within its rights to go after a company who's main source of income would be a clear breach of the OS X licence.
Whether you agree with it or not, the software you buy (or download from OSS sites) has a licence - if you break the licence you might get away with it, or the enforcer of that licence may come after you.
You can't be anti-competitive in your own market. OS X is licensed to run on Macs - if you want to use it for another purpose, you can buy a copy and do so. If you want to base your business on that, Apple will have issues with that.
It's not possible to be anti-competitive to deny your product to people you don't want to sell it to. This is NOT LIKE denying your product to a vendor unless they agree not to sell your competitor's product - THAT is anti-competitve.
Vertical integration of hardware and software has been going on in the computer industry since its inception. Only when it's Apple does anyone seem to have any problem with it. Apple are only hurting their own profits by stopping Psystar and while they chose to do this for brand reasons, whether you agree the trade off is positive or negative for them makes no bearing.
Only if they turn around now and say to Psystar "we'll sell you copies of OS X to use, as long as you stop selling Windows pre-installed" - not THAT should be illegal (and is).
Just because the government owns some businesses and is proposing a private insurance coop backed by the government does not make it socialism.
The US economy is not based on socialism by any stretch of the chalk, nor are other world economies that have large government involvement in various industries - it does not make them socialist systems.
The US government doesn't own large portions of the banking sector and automotive sector for the benefit of the people directly. It has had to step in because the threat of failure of those systems is too damaging to do what they would ideally do: let those systems fail. The whole american economy is based on that: if you don;t make money, you fold up and die.... unless you're "too big to fail". It doesn't make the system socialist unless you want to strictly define any state involvement in industry as socialism, regardless of the underlying economic factors or political structure. If this is the case, then socialism stepped in to save thousands of jobs, billions of dollars and the US economy as a whole because capitalism failed and had no fix it.
Consider the UK - we have an enormous welfare state, universal healthcare for all citizens, and large government involvement in industry and yet we're not a socialist political or economic system. "a political theory advocating state ownership of industry" is far too simplistic a definition to accurately categorise the realities of complex countries, policies and economies.
No, socialism in pejorative terms really means "whatever isn't free market" in American politics parlance.
Socialism itself is quite narrowly defined, and while it features state control for the benefit of a populace as part of it, that is where the similarity with what Obama has done with the bailouts and what he has attempted to do with healthcare.
It's a victory for propaganda machine that anything Obama proposes is called socialism - it's really nothing like it.
So why is this "but no" - a 46% share of the market that your product is targeting is excellent, regardless of how small that market segment is. The idea is not to be the very best or you've failed, it's to be profitable and produce a product people want to buy. Apple is very good at that, and is proving that with the emerging market for smartphones in Japan, where phone culture is vastly different to the US and Europe.
It may be a very small share, but it is the lion's share of a small market - by any stretch that is successful, assuming that you are actually making decent profits on the sales (ie, that they don't have a user base of a hundred, after spending thousands on TV adverts and shipping and distribution etc).
It's a similar model to how they treat their computer hardware - a small (but growing) user base that doesn't seek to be number 1, just continues to make money hand over fist (love it or hate it).
The Shuttle worked ok, but it was less than ideal for the task, cost far more than it should have and has never lived up to the design goal (although it was clearly very successful).
They don't want to fix it by "turning the entire system over to Uncle Sam" - they wanted to introduce a government-provided private insurance option that would compete with other private insurers.
The private insurance companies know that they don't like competition unless they're all on the same side: the side of profits over patients, so they have spent a great deal of money and effort to convince people that somehow adding a new player to the game is somehow "removing choice" and that this is about "socialising healthcare" rather than increasing access to healthcare for more people.
Good lord, if Obama really wanted to push a socialised healthcare system on the US I think Rush might explode with the force of a small atom bomb laced with prescription opiates.
Instead, all the special interests have their hooks into their employees in the senate (on both sides, and the independent "side") to kill anything that gets through until it's been carefully reshaped into something that benefits the insurance industry at the expense of the American people.
It's also very distasteful that so much time is being spent on limiting access to a procedure that is perfectly legal (abortion) because of spurious religious reasons - whatever happened to freedom of religion?
Republicans won't come to the table because they have been told not to, and anyone who would disobey that would be annihilated in the media by the right wing shouty mouthpieces that represent the party.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple does not use TPM.
Hell, it doesn't even use DRM - the OS X install disk is completely unprotected, has no serial numbers, activation codes, online activation or anything of the sort.
There's a trivial plaintext bit you need to remove called (not kidding) "Don't Steal OS X.kext" or something similar from the image which allows you to make your hackintosh.
There's no TPM involved or encryption to break.
And you should also read the book US vs MS - the rules are literally different for a monopoly leveraging its position to gain market share - eg, an OS monopoly being used to gain and maintain a browser monopoly.
The statement is not at all false, let alone "totally".
Fine if they changed their minds afterwards, but what actually happened was akin to:
Psystar: I'll have 10,000 copies of OS X please!
Apple : Sure, that will be 10,000 x $29 please... these are for use on Apple hardware right?
Pystar: Of course!
Apple: ok then, thanks for shopping at Apple!
Psystar: Sweet, 10,000 copies of OS X to install on PCs!
Apple: Hey! Quit it!
It's not like they didn't know ahead of time that the licence didn't allow use on non-Apple hardware.
Ford isn't going to care if you, as a hobbyist, buys parts from Ford to use in a Chevy. It probably will care if a business starts up that sells Ford parts for use in Chevy cars, especially if any of Ford's brands are involved on those products - like Mustang-branded seats or similar.
It's just there. It's not used by OS X, and is not present on all Macs (in a forward production fashion - ie, some older ones have it, some newer ones don't), so it's clearly not part of a "TPM strategy".
It's probably just hardware that come along for the ride when the logic board was designed - ie, it was part of some standard chipset Apple used. It may have been part of a strategy that was subsequently abandoned (for the iTunes store for example), if Apple wanted bargaining chips with the movie and music industries.
We'll never really know, but any TPM hardware on a Mac is not used by the OS for that purpose.
Yes.
If they sold a "ready to go hackintosh, just follow these steps" with a sealed copy of OS X then there's really nothing Apple could do about that - the copy of OS X might be being sold for use on an Apple machine, maybe not, but the decision is a user one, not Pystar's at that point.
Because the user licence that comes with OS X prevents you from doing that.
Technically Apple could come after you for your 1 hackintosh box that you have for personal use but it choses not to (at least so far, but signs so far seem to suggest that they really don't care about homebrew).
What they *do* care *very much* about is people selling them on as ready made PCs with OS X installed, and you're right, there is no technical difference between the guy who does it to one machine for himself and the guy who does it to a hundred machines and sells them to his friends, but it's entirely up to Apple who it goes after for licence violations. It's not like a trademark issue where you must defend any breach or you risk losing the mark - they will probably have an economic vs brand protection chart where "personal use" becomes "hackintosh vendor" and you become a target.
Make no mistake though, you are always a target if you make a hackintosh - they just leave you alone because you're no threat to their business model. The NFL won't care if you tape the game, but it will care if you then sell that tape on ebay.
Ok, ok, bad analogy, the NFL will care very deeply if you tape the game and will froth and foam and rage about home taping taking the food out of the starving mouths of NFL players' children, but you see my point.
And if you can't see that the two are both legally protected licences, then you should be moderated down accordingly.
The point is not that the two are equal, just that they are both enforceable by law, and a conscious decision to ignore one of them harms the other.
The law preventing me from stealing a car is very different from the one that prevents me obtaining that car via fraudulent means, but both of them are laws that will get me in trouble. If I think it's ok to obtain property by fraud, even though it's illegal then the guy next door to me can go and steal a car directly and claim that he also ended up with a car, so what's the big deal.
There *have* been cases that have tested EULAs in court, and while the rulings have not set a general precedent in the US, in general a EULA will stand up.
I never equated the GPL and a EULA in anything but contract terms: ie, a set of conditions that apply to a piece of software you want to use.
Read my post again, specifically this bit:
"Deliberately breaking their own software for no other reason than greed (eg, DRM in WMP, deliberate crippling of the "Home" edition of XP for no technical reason is not anticompetitive, it's just silly."
Where I said it was ok of MS to do that, it was just a silly business idea.
And monopolies per se are ok - it;s when you use that monopoly to exploit another business area when the line is crossed.
There is no difference between them - you just don;t want to equate the "godly" GPL, designed to protect freedom with "nasty" EULAs, but the principle is exactly the same: the software comes with a set of conditions (legally protected and enforceable conditions) for its use. The GPL is one variant of that, a EULA is another.
The GPL takes away my right to do certain things too - whether you think those rights are taken away for a good reason or not, they are restrictions on what you can do with GPL protected software. (I happen to agree wholly with the GPL and its goals, but I am illustrating a point).
You cannot have it both ways - trying to find a way to make it ok to break Apple's licence by defining it differently just won't cut it. You either respect licence conditions or you don't. If you don;t agree to Apple's conditions then don't buy the software.
I think I have compromised enough by having to write "sulfur hexafluoride", which is a terrible misspelling, but the common wy you see sulphur spelled nowadays.
And yes, I am a chemist. :)
No, I think that's just the nature of online debates, sometimes people misinterpret.
It depends what they are doing - intentional breaking like the mangling of Java so that the dominant form would be IE at the expense of the real standard *is* anti-competitve, since it was designed to ensure that IE would maintain the browser market.
Deliberately breaking their own software for no other reason than greed (eg, DRM in WMP, deliberate crippling of the "Home" edition of XP for no technical reason is not anticompetitive, it's just silly.
And yes, that holds true - you can't be anti-competitive with yourself, but you can use your monopoly share in one market to force someone else out of business by breaking their standard on purpose.
The licence for OS X says "only to be used on Apple hardware" and if you want to stay true to that licence, you cannot make a business model out of selling machines with OS X preinstalled that clearly break the licence.
If you think "well, the licence should be ignored" then sure, as long as the GPL can also be ignored at will, or any other software licence for that matter.
Vertical integration is not illegal, and it does not harm any competitor if Apple choses to go after a company breaking its licence to OS X (other than the company in breach of the licence of course).
Apple hasn't gone after individual hackintosh creators, but it is well within its rights to go after a company who's main source of income would be a clear breach of the OS X licence.
Whether you agree with it or not, the software you buy (or download from OSS sites) has a licence - if you break the licence you might get away with it, or the enforcer of that licence may come after you.
You can't be anti-competitive in your own market. OS X is licensed to run on Macs - if you want to use it for another purpose, you can buy a copy and do so. If you want to base your business on that, Apple will have issues with that.
It's not possible to be anti-competitive to deny your product to people you don't want to sell it to. This is NOT LIKE denying your product to a vendor unless they agree not to sell your competitor's product - THAT is anti-competitve.
Vertical integration of hardware and software has been going on in the computer industry since its inception. Only when it's Apple does anyone seem to have any problem with it. Apple are only hurting their own profits by stopping Psystar and while they chose to do this for brand reasons, whether you agree the trade off is positive or negative for them makes no bearing.
Only if they turn around now and say to Psystar "we'll sell you copies of OS X to use, as long as you stop selling Windows pre-installed" - not THAT should be illegal (and is).
It's not actually the proper name - The IUPAC name is aluminium, with the US spelling being an acceptable variant.
Just because the government owns some businesses and is proposing a private insurance coop backed by the government does not make it socialism.
The US economy is not based on socialism by any stretch of the chalk, nor are other world economies that have large government involvement in various industries - it does not make them socialist systems.
The US government doesn't own large portions of the banking sector and automotive sector for the benefit of the people directly. It has had to step in because the threat of failure of those systems is too damaging to do what they would ideally do: let those systems fail. The whole american economy is based on that: if you don;t make money, you fold up and die.... unless you're "too big to fail". It doesn't make the system socialist unless you want to strictly define any state involvement in industry as socialism, regardless of the underlying economic factors or political structure. If this is the case, then socialism stepped in to save thousands of jobs, billions of dollars and the US economy as a whole because capitalism failed and had no fix it.
Consider the UK - we have an enormous welfare state, universal healthcare for all citizens, and large government involvement in industry and yet we're not a socialist political or economic system. "a political theory advocating state ownership of industry" is far too simplistic a definition to accurately categorise the realities of complex countries, policies and economies.
Gee... I'm a Southern Baptist (who regularly attend church, Creationist, etc...), however; I neither care for Pat Robertson nor Sarah Palin.
In that case, you'll just have to evolve a sense of humour.
Oh, sorry.
No, socialism in pejorative terms really means "whatever isn't free market" in American politics parlance.
Socialism itself is quite narrowly defined, and while it features state control for the benefit of a populace as part of it, that is where the similarity with what Obama has done with the bailouts and what he has attempted to do with healthcare.
It's a victory for propaganda machine that anything Obama proposes is called socialism - it's really nothing like it.
Add together 24.6 and 21.5 (from the link you posted). I'll wait.
So why is this "but no" - a 46% share of the market that your product is targeting is excellent, regardless of how small that market segment is. The idea is not to be the very best or you've failed, it's to be profitable and produce a product people want to buy. Apple is very good at that, and is proving that with the emerging market for smartphones in Japan, where phone culture is vastly different to the US and Europe.
It may be a very small share, but it is the lion's share of a small market - by any stretch that is successful, assuming that you are actually making decent profits on the sales (ie, that they don't have a user base of a hundred, after spending thousands on TV adverts and shipping and distribution etc).
It's a similar model to how they treat their computer hardware - a small (but growing) user base that doesn't seek to be number 1, just continues to make money hand over fist (love it or hate it).
I would if he presented any facts - where are the citations, where are the figures?
All I can see is a baseless jab at Obama.
Incidentally, that sig article is hilarious. Was it written for SNL?
It's about getting it right.
The Shuttle worked ok, but it was less than ideal for the task, cost far more than it should have and has never lived up to the design goal (although it was clearly very successful).
They don't want to fix it by "turning the entire system over to Uncle Sam" - they wanted to introduce a government-provided private insurance option that would compete with other private insurers.
The private insurance companies know that they don't like competition unless they're all on the same side: the side of profits over patients, so they have spent a great deal of money and effort to convince people that somehow adding a new player to the game is somehow "removing choice" and that this is about "socialising healthcare" rather than increasing access to healthcare for more people.
Good lord, if Obama really wanted to push a socialised healthcare system on the US I think Rush might explode with the force of a small atom bomb laced with prescription opiates.
Instead, all the special interests have their hooks into their employees in the senate (on both sides, and the independent "side") to kill anything that gets through until it's been carefully reshaped into something that benefits the insurance industry at the expense of the American people.
It's also very distasteful that so much time is being spent on limiting access to a procedure that is perfectly legal (abortion) because of spurious religious reasons - whatever happened to freedom of religion?
Republicans won't come to the table because they have been told not to, and anyone who would disobey that would be annihilated in the media by the right wing shouty mouthpieces that represent the party.
Your pejorative, and erroneous use of the word "socialism" betrays your bias.