Can Apple stop the Open Computer?

by billso on Tuesday, 15 April 2008

15 April is tax dead­line day in the United States. Next month, many US tax­pay­ers will get a rebate check that Pres­i­dent Bush hopes they will spend to boost the flag­ging economy.

Why not spend that check on a new com­puter? Accord­ing to Good Morn­ing Sil­i­con Val­ley, Psys­tar will sell you an Open Com­puter. It’s an Intel PC that ships with an ugly case, a fresh copy of Mac OS X Leop­ard and a few soft­ware dri­vers gen­er­ated by the open source osx86 project.

Why pay Apple’s hard­ware prices when an Intel PC can run the Mac oper­at­ing sys­tem? It’s easy to build your own Mac-compatible Intel PC, and use the open source soft­ware and a copy of Leop­ard. In fact, this is a fine project for a stu­dent who has the resources and time… as long as they do not sell the final product.

Wired has pointed out one small prob­lem with Psystar’s plan: Apple’s user license for Leop­ard specif­i­cally states that the oper­at­ing sys­tem can only be used on Apple-branded hard­ware. Psys­tar can­not really sell a Mac oper­at­ing sys­tem with a beige-box computer.

Per­haps this is why Psys­tar changed the product’s name yes­ter­day. It was listed as “Open­Mac”. The Mac name is trade­marked by Apple, of course.

MacRu­mors has more infor­ma­tion for those who are interested.

I sense a cease-and-desist order com­ing from 1 Infi­nite Loop in Cuper­tino, California.

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Tagged as: Apple, copyright, economy, hardware, mac, open-source, software, trademark, USA

  • http://billso.com billso

    Accord­ing to Engad­get, Psys­tar won’t give up any time soon.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Now Engad­get says that the OSx86 project par­tic­i­pants are ques­tion­ing Psystar’s rights to resell their open source software.

    Netkas, the author of the EFI emu­la­tor, which allows a stock PC to boot Apple’s OS, has changed his license terms to pre­vent com­mer­cial use of his software.

    Charles Arthur, a report for the Guardian, tried to track down Psystar’s offices in South Florida. His arti­cle is hilarious.

    Some­one in Miami is hav­ing a really bad week!

  • http://billso.com billso

    ZDnet has posted a good update on the Psys­tar Open­Mac mess.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Mac­World has a great arti­cle on how to build your own Mac clone from off-the-shelf parts. Assem­bling cop­muter is the easy part. Adjust­ing the BIOS so that Leop­ard and the OSx86 shims will boot the com­puter can be tricky.

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