Apple has sued Psystar, the marketers of the Open Computer, according to Jorge Espinoza’s article, Apple Goes After Clone Maker Psystar, and ZDnet. Apple seems to have a solid case, as Psystar modified Apple’s software as part of the Florida company’s product offerings. The original name of the Psystar product was the OpenMac, which didn’t please Apple, either.
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.
LEGO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first Danish patent on Monday. I grew up playing with a few tubs of LEGO – the basic blocks and some trays, no kits!
BusinessWeek posted a nice slideshow of LEGO’s manufacturing process. The company produces 19 billion LEGO bricks each year with very high quality standards: only 18 of every 1 million bricks is defective.
That’s 36,000 bricks each minute, and more than 2 million an hour, according to Neatorama.
PopAndCo.com has a cute flash animation of the process. The audio track is loud, however.
LEGO is moving most of its brick manufacturing from Denmark to Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the New York Times. US manufacturing and distribution is being moved to Mexican outsourcing firm Flextronics, according to this report.
In September 2007, SupplyChainDigest published a good report about how LEGO management came to this decision. Earlier attempts to fix the company’s value chain had helped, but outsourcing was a step the company was reluctant to take. LEGO toys are an important symbol in European lives.
On BoingBoing, an editor created a timelapse video while he built a 5000-piece, US$500 kit of the Millennium Falcon.
As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for LEGO closes with a brief discussion of the trademark.
Tags: Denmark, EU, Europe, LEGO, outsource, patent, process, quality, system, toy, trademark, value-chain, videoI found some poems today on PlagiarismToday, a blog that discusses content theft and copyright issues.MBA students don’t need to know this information, but we will discuss intellectual property law in a few weeks. It is relevant to an information systems course.Anything that helps students remember the basics - short of tattooing - is welcome.
Tags: content, copyright, crime, patent, trademark, USA
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