Additional Thoughts on the OpenMac Announcement.

April 15th, 2008, by 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 in 10.6 as the latest.
  3. 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.
6 comments - (Comments closed)
«  
  »
  • http://homepage.mac.com/simx/technonova/index.html Simone Manganelli

    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​.osx​book​.com/​b​o​o​k​/​b​o​n​u​s​/​c​h​a​p​t​e​r​7​/​t​p​m​d​r​m​m​y​th/

  • http://homepage.mac.com/simx/technonova/index.html Simone Manganelli

    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​.osx​book​.com/​b​o​o​k​/​b​o​n​u​s​/​c​h​a​p​t​e​r​7​/​t​p​m​d​r​m​m​y​th/

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    @Simone 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.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    @Simone 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.

  • http://homepage.mac.com/simx/technonova/index.html Simone Manganelli

    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.

  • http://homepage.mac.com/simx/technonova/index.html Simone Manganelli

    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.