Apple and Psystar enter out-of-court counseling Before Apple and Psystar take their fight over Mac clones to court, the two must first attempt to work out their legal scrape with private mediation. The companies have agreed to participate in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) under court orders, according to filings turned up by The Mac Observer. The two have been …
But Apple's goose is cooked no matter how much they "hose" the Psystar dweebs, the horses are already out of the barn when Apple switched to a generic Intel PC platform for greedy reasons (to get cheap and ALL of Intel's NAND production run). Sticking on a single OS blocking PROM on an essentially generic platform (at twice the price for the Apple Premium) that could just as easily be in a POS Dell made in the very same Chinese Sweatshop mud brick "factories", is not enough to convince any Judge that Macs are anything but a plain ol "my too PC". So any claims of anyone not having "permission" to slap OS heXed on some other generic PC box is just something Apple will not be able to defend.
Smart Ass Stevie? You cooked you greedy own ass. Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.........
Prediction - look for more Clone "me too Macs" coming down the pike and AAPL flailing to $19. p/ share. Oh there won't be more OS X powered Macs, just less that Apple will sell.
"is not enough to convince any Judge"
how could you possibly know? we will have to wait for the outcome of the proceedings to know what the court decides (if it does go to court now that it is in mediation). but even if it doesn't go to court and Psystar quietly stops selling preinstalled systems, then it would be obvious that the mediation didn't go in their favour and that would mean that Psystar's lawyers no longer think that a judge would rule in their favour or else they'd simply advice their client to reject the outcome of the mediation and bring the case in front of the court again.
In other words, nobody really knows what the outcome will be until this case is over.
How does the fact that the mac is a hybrid Intel platform have any bearing on the OSX licence terms? It doesn't. Apple isn't stopping you loading Vista onto a Mac. It does however only licence its own operating system for its own hardware. Psystar is definitely in the wrong when it sells a generic box with pre-installed OSX. Ironically it probably could sell a generic box and a 'helper' disc to allow the end user to do the installation. Its no more legal overall, but now its the end user breaking the licencing terms, not the box shifter. The question is, will a court view Apple's stance as abuse of a monopoly position? I suspect not, primarily because they do not hold a significant market share in the PC marketplace. Although... it is interesting that Apple have not tried to use a legal instrument to halt Psystar sales, so maybe they do have something to worry about.
I'd love to be able to run, supported, OSX on my non-Apple hardware (I suspect Microsoft's market share would drop significantly and quickly down to 60-70%) but I'm not holding my breath.
OK, deep breath waiting for the flames to hit. None of which I will respond to. Pass the fire hose.
Oh goody, so it gets opened up and then every fucktard in the universe builds some ropey machine from parts they found in there shed and OS X becomes bloatware like Vista as it tries to support every single configuration under the sun.
That's one of the things that makes OS X so good, it has pre configured hardware and it works very well with it....
I hope to hell this doesn't change with some 2 bit shite coming to market. Sometimes anti competitivity is good, when it's actually "for the best"
It's not what is being done, its who does it.
If private individuals choose to do things that Apple or Microsoft licences don't "allow" then (a) it has little or no imact on the bottom line (unless the practice is very widespread) and (b) it is not usually practical to find and pursue those individuals (unless, like Microsoft, you try and do it through a 'genuine advantage' programme).
If on the other hand a company chooses to do, for example, what Psystar are doing, then there is a visible impact to the bottom line because of the volumes involved and repeated violations of the licence that has been purchased (remember you're buying the right to use the software, not ownership of the software), and this is why Apple are taking action.
Microsoft probably would take action if a box shifter started selling XBoxes with, say, Linux pre-installed, and in fact the whole ideal of locking a hardware/software combination is not restricted to Apple - Microsoft attempted to lock down XBox hardware to prevent people running pirated games and non-approved software but failed pretty dismally.
"Oh goody, so it gets opened up and then every fucktard in the universe builds some ropey machine from parts they found in there shed and OS X becomes bloatware like Vista as it tries to support every single configuration under the sun."
The thing is, it's already running on shite hardware: the Intel x86 platform. Apple did a stupid decision by completely ditching PPC, its kind of trading in your Ferrari for a Ford Pinto. Ironically, they also opened up the possibility for MacOS X to run in common hardware, so it's only the Apple EFI stopping the average Joe from plucking MacOS X on a PC. Oh wait, a "Mac" is also a "PC" anyways, that'll be a "non-Apple PC" then.
I'd really like to see Psystar win this thing; the monopoly argument might hold water, as the hardware restriction seems to be like AT&T's "only use Ma Bell's phones on my line", and we know how that ended up. If they win, the possible outcomes are either Apple releases Mac OS X for any PC, or they switch back to PPC. Any of those two outcomes will be good for consumers.
Oh, and supporting a zillion components shouldn't turn OSX into "bloatware". Linux seems to manage pretty well...
In most countries, reverse engineering is legal. This is exactly how Compaq got away with reverse engineering the PC BIOS, and has nothing to do with any goodwill from IBM (who were seriously pissed off from what I recall). See this link for details: http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
What people seem to forget is that fair use only applies to *end users*, fair use does not apply to resellers. That means, if Joe Schmoe sticks a legal copy of OSX on a generic PC, he may be within the boundaries of fair use rights. However, if a retailer does it for boxes they resell, they have no right to do so because fair use does not apply to them.
The PPC chips had to go. There's a reason they never made a notebook computer with a G5 chip: it's far too hot. I have a PowerBook G4 running at just 800 MHz, and it threatens my fertility every time I put it on my lap. The 1.67 GHz ones are probably an effective means of birth control. I do wish they'd gone with AMD rather than Intel, though; at least AMD still has sensible product names.
Apple don't have a BIOS. They use Intel's EFI as firmware for their Intel Macs and when they used PPC chips they used SUN's OpenFirmware.
In other words, Apple do not make their firmware themselves, they license existing firmware from other companies. However, Apple do have their own OS. It is that OS, not the hardware or firmware which they have all legal rights to, including the right to determine how it is being licensed.
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