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.
- 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.
- 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 in 10.6 as the latest.
- It gets worse. Every Mac currently shipping has a TPM Module that, currently, does fuck all. That module could easily be used to tie OS X installs to legitimate Apple hardware, should Apple feel the need to do so.
The bottom line is that Apple has, so far, been fairly tolerant of OS X on generic PC hackers. That situation might drastically change once someone starts fucking with their revenue stream.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Simone Manganelli
// Apr 19, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Point #3 is incorrect. Apple did start shipping TPM modules with the first Intel Macs, but with subsequent generations they actually removed it.
See Amit Singh’s weblog post on this myth: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
2 The Angry Drunk
// Apr 19, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I stand corrected. Thanks for the info. Wouldn’t take much to add the TPM back in though if Apple felt the need. This is all a moot point anyway since it looks like the whole thing was a scam/prank.
3 Simone Manganelli
// Apr 20, 2008 at 11:09 am
Apple could easily add it back, but with so many Intel Macs having shipped without a TPM module, it would be hard for Apple to enforce any kind of activation policy based on the TPM module until a few years down the road. It wouldn’t be feasible to include such a check in 10.6, and maybe not even 10.7, depending upon the length of the Mac OS X release cycle from here on out.
Apple would have to go with a “certificate of authenticity”/serial number route as Microsoft does if they wanted to add in activation immediately.
I would request, however, that you correct your weblog post by lining out point #3: it’s a widespread myth, and it’d be good not to perpetuate it for readers who visit this entry but don’t read the comments.
Leave a Comment