Apple Sues Psystar
It seems as though Apple is taking legal action and suing Mac clone company Psystar. The rumour mills have been kicked into overdrive with a report from ZDNet that Apple has finally filed suit against the company that began touting Mac clones back in April.
A few months back the media was buzzing with the news of these new fangled Mac clones. There were all sorts of issues from the Psystar website, which crashed for long periods of time from the amount of traffic it was experience, to “discrepancies” with the brick and mortar address for the company.
The address was changed a couple of times, including listing the location of a packing company as the Psystar address. These mistakes were rectified once we cut to the chase and called the president of the computer company ourselves. Rudy Pedraza updated the address on the website while on the phone to Tom’s.
Dodgy address listings and site crashes aside, there was also the issue of Open Computers coming pre-installed with Leopard. The end user licensing agreement for Leopard states that the licence allows you to install, use and run one copy of the OS on a single Apple-labeled computer, operative words being Apple-labeled. According to ComputerWorld (which cites a Miami-based lawyer’s blog) Apple’s legal team are pursuing Psystar’s violation of the Leopard EULA.
When we spoke to Psystar President, Rudy Pedraza back in April, we asked about Apple’s EULA for Leopard and reiterated the fact that no one was allowed to use Leopard on a computer that wasn’t Apple-labeled. Pedraza’s response was,
"We’re going to do it whether Steve Jobs likes it or not."
Then again the president also claimed the company was just trying to help Apple and Steve make some more money.
"We’re here to help Steve Jobs. He’s not making enough money. We’re here to help him increase sales."
Somehow we’re not quite sure how that’s going to fly in a court of law. Stay tuned for more.
In any case, I'm pretty sure they'll have to ditch that policy somewhere along the way anyway, if they actually want to become a significant competitor to Windows, since I doubt competition authorities are going to let such arbitrary rules pass which clearly hurt customers.
Plain and simple.
/leaves
Apple doesn't have to license their OS if they don't want to. Could Apple increase their marketshare if they licensed the OS to other manufacturers? Sure, but they have made their choice. We can complain about it all we want, but we really don't have much legal say in the matter. Psystar chose to skirt licensing agreements on several fronts, and they should not be surprised when a lawsuit.
If they really wanted to stay different and keep a platform and OS unto themselves, they should have stayed away from x86 hardware.
I've wondered that too. I seem to remember something about OSX not shipping on the Psystar systems but having to be user installed. In the end I think the question would be how much 'enabling' Psystar is doing. Judging from past statements though I think Psystar's claim is that Apple's EULA is not enforceable and possibly not legal.
Apple doesn't need more OS userbase, they only need to sell those expensive machines (IMO) and that's about it.
I really don't care much about Macs these days, got tired of the spoiled brats and stupid Apple fanboys.
Only a few pro users actually know what a Mac can or can't do, everybody else only wants to show their machine style and play WoW.
Psystar does it for the money like every company that goes in the Apple Bandwagon.
Apple probably didn't have a choice but go with x86, especially in the notebook space. PPC development had effectively stalled, especially on Motorola's front. There was no way that Apple could have crammed a G5 into a laptop. There were other PPC developers, but I doubt Apple was going to trust them after many years of getting screwed. (Although, Apple just bought one.) I would imagine that Apple also got to see Intel's offerings and realized that was the way to go. Intel had been courting Apple since the 1980's. The most significant part in the Intel transition was Apple starting OSX-x86 development from the very beginning. That foresight is what made the transition relatively seamless since they didn't have to go an port OSX after several updates.
The basic fact is that OSX is Apple's property, and they can do what they want with it. If they want to license it, then they will. If they don't want to, then they don't have to.
As much as I'd like to see mac clones again, I just didn't think the Psystar approach was a good one. If they went belly-up, all of their customers would be screwed since they would never get updates. It was always more for the hobbiest crowd than the general public. I certainly hope that Apple got the message that there's a bigger audience. We'll just have to see, I suppose.
It's also no different than the console makers. It's not like MS is letting people install the xbox OS onto any old x86 or PPC computer.
I prefer my computer to have style and play alot of shooters..
But you're right,apple sucks,and so does their fanboys.
As for the other side, the Apple fanatics who buy up everything that has an Apple label, get over yourselves. Steve Jobs is not the Second Coming (though he is a very impressive businessman). Nor is OS X the end-all, be-all of operating systems. It does a lot of things very well, and in a lot of situations, better than other operating systems. But Windows and Linux are just as capable, if not more so in areas where Apple is weak.
As to how this will play out in the courts, who is to say? One could hope that Apple finally wakes up to realize that the real cash cow is in software, not hardware. Any integrator can put a computer together. In fact, while Apple still designs their systems, they job out all the assembly to factories all over Asia. The real genius is in the operating system that brings all those random components together. Apple has a real opportunity here, while MS is still fumbling around with Vista and figuring out how they are going to force users to "downgrade" to the latest version. If they make a deal with even one major integrator (like Dell, Compaq or Lenovo), they could very well open the market and compete directly against MS, rather than indirectly on different hardware platforms.