The Angry Drunk

Update to yesterday’s big Mac story. So, appar­ently the Psystards (come on, they handed me that one) have vowed to fight Apple in court for their “right” to sell generic PC’s with OS X installed. Amazingly, the blo­gok­lein­bot­tle response has actu­ally been some­what intel­li­gent, but that’s a rant for another day. What I want to focus on here is a few rea­sons why Psystar win­ning a judge­ment against the clause in the OS X license agree­ment bar­ring the instal­la­tion of the OS on non-Apple hard­ware is a very bad thing.

1. Should Apple’s restric­tions on hard­ware instal­la­tion be struck down, I guar­an­tee there would be imme­di­ate chal­lenges to the GPL; espe­cially GPLv3, with it’s anti hard­ware DRM provisions.
2. Currently Apple doesn’t force any sort of acti­va­tion scheme ala Windows. Instead they trust their users to abide by the terms that they agreed to in the license agree­ment. In fact, Apple pretty much turns a blind eye to all man­ner of per­sonal vio­la­tions of the agree­ment as long as they don’t affect the bot­tom line. Once a third party starts mak­ing money off of sell­ing OS X “com­pat­i­ble” boxes, I expect prod­uct acti­va­tion to appear
   

   Continue read­ing Additional Thoughts on the OpenMac Announcement.