Perpetual quest for GNU smartphone

[Shlomi Fish]

On Monday 01 June 2009 00:50:47 geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> On Jun 1, 2009, at 12:29 AM, Shlomi Loubaton wrote:
> >> There was a company who made a lot of noise around providing "MAC
> >> compatibles" recently. They finally wen bankrupt a while ago.
> >>
> >> 
> >> http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/05/mac_clone_maker_psystar_goe
> >>s_bankrupt.html
>
> Bad example. Psystar was built on selling computers with stolen copies
> of MacOS. According to the EULA (which was enforcable in the US), you
> can only use it on a real Apple Mac.
>

"stolen"? How were they stolen? Did Psystar robbed a store at gunpoint of 
their legitimate copies of Mac OS? (In nice shrinkwrap boxes)? Or maybe you 
mean stolen as in illegally copied:

http://xrl.us/bew8ao

This is not the case for, it, however, either. Psystar has legitimately 
acquired these licences to Mac OS X.

You are right that what Psystar did was a violation of the Apple's terms-of-
service as written in their EULA, which specify that you must use Mac OS X on 
Apple hardware. But this is a different violations of copyrights/licences law. 
And whether Apple should be legally allowed to mandate this is debatable. 

> It's also something thousands of people have done, but none hang
> around for a long time, and none do it commerically. It was IMHO good
> that they did fold, if they could do it, then it is likely that all
> licenses of that type would be unenforcable, including the GPL.
>

I found it hard to believe that if Psystar had won, then all licences would 
have become unenforceable. Software licences law is well-established. The most 
that could have happened is that clauses like the one that Apple inserted 
about only using on certified hardware, would have been ruled unenforceable. 
And if they were, it may not be a bad thing, because the GPL, and other free 
software licences has nothing like that, and every free software must be 
usable for any purpose.

For further analysis see:

http://blog.shemesh.biz/?p=551

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Best Introductory Programming Language - http://xrl.us/bjn84

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
read.