$399 Psystar Mac clone draws angry response
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We discussed 3 days back on the topic OpenMac for $399 — a PC white box running *unmodified* Leopard. How long can Apple let them go?
And it didn’t really take long for the world to take note - and draw an angry response from one of the principal hackers involved in developing the software involved.
Aside from the legal ramifications of selling “white-box” systems running Apple’s Mac OS X, questions have arisen over the exact nature of Psystar, the firm advertising the systems; and even whether it exists. Psystar appears to be a small operation that has only recently established a Web presence, and which is struggling to cope with the sudden interest aroused by its Mac clone. The product’s name has changed over the past week, from Open Mac to Open Computer. Psystar’s e-commerce site has suffered outages, and while it is currently functioning, users have noticed some anomalies–at one point, for instance, the site required users to submit a credit-card number, but then would accept only PayPal payments. There are also posts on the web which suggest that all this is a big joke!
OSx86 anger
If the Open Computer does in fact exist, Apple might not be too happy about it–but neither will the hackers who have developed the “OSx86″ software Psystar claims to use. Thus far, Apple has made no concerted effort to stamp out the OSx86 project, which consists of various patches allowing Mac OS X to run on commodity hardware, no doubt in part because it has been used only on a small scale and is relatively difficult to implement.
Psystar is proposing, however, to use OSx86-developed tools as the basis for its systems. On its Web site, the firm specifically mentions PC EFI V8, an emulator for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) that lies between OSX and the Intel firmware.
Netkas, the programmer who led the PC EFI effort, retorted angrily to Psystar on his blog. “This is a violation of my authorship rights on PC EFI V8,” he wrote. The patch’s license forbids any “redistribution… for direct or indirect commercial purposes”, Netkas wrote.
Following complaints from OSx86 hackers, Psystar added a statement to its website crediting Netkas for the PC EFI software. “To the open-source community: thank you,” the statement said.
The installation of OSX on a non-Apple computer is expressly forbidden by Apple’s end-user licensing agreement (EULA). Nevertheless, some lawyers have said Apple will have a hard time stopping firms such as Psystar from breaking the agreement, because of the relative weakness of breach-of-contract disputes.
Source: ZDNet, Psystar, Netkas
