Second, if you only care about what lawyers have to say, then why bother commenting at all? Let’s just wait until the judge decides. As for the whole EULA, previous articles on this very same subject have mentioned that very same point: whether EULAS are enforceable at all or not. But please stop trying to muddy the waters by bringing up a bunch of irrelevant points.įirst, I’m not trying to say they are *clearly* wrong, just describing why *I* think that single clause isn’t necessarily invalid. And my opinion on whether it should be or not is just another opinion of a non lawyer so I won’t even go there. I don’t know whether the clause is enforceable or not. The fact is the issue is about a single clause in the EULA that has nothing to do with upgrades or making the whole EULA in applicable. With a name like PowerMacX you’re obviously biased about this subject and grasping at straws trying to make it seem like Psystar and others are clearly wrong. Mac OS X, at $129 (compared to a full Vista which used to cost upwards $400), is to me an “upgrade” price, because by the EULA you are supposed to have paid for a Mac with a previous version already. Upgrades are cheaper because you already paid for a previous version. They don’t do that now, instead they simply say “to be installed only on Apple-labeled computers”. What do upgrades have to do with Mac OS X? At some point, Apple used to label all OS releases as “upgrades”, after all, since you can’t buy a Mac without some version of Mac OS preinstalled, any later version could be considered an upgrade. ![]() And if it does check for previous license, by the same line of reasoning that makes people think it would be “valid” to remove any check Apple may add to Mac OS X to make sure you only install it on a Mac, it would be “valid” to remove a similar “check from previous versions” from upgrades. ![]() The problem with that is that if you ignore that EULA you may just as well ignore *any* licensing terms, so long as you don’t violate copyright.īut… what happens then to “upgrade” licenses? Any upgrade that doesn’t check for previous versions installs (as a convenience to the buyer) could be installed “legally” even if you don’t actually own a previous version, as long as you ignore the fact the the license required it. The basic excuse used for preinstalling Mac OS X and violating the EULA seems to boil down to “I paid for it, I can install it anywhere I want, no matter what the EULA may say”. Is the fact that is “hard” to fight a reason not to bother at all? You can make the same argument about almost anything, from software piracy to drunk driving. I find this line of reasoning repeated in every single story about Pystar & friends, but I don’t see it as valid. They can fight, tooth and nail, against this and may win a few battles, but they will inevitably lose the war. If they’re worried about hardware sales dropping in the latter case, then they could raise the price of OS X by a relatively small amount and still keep it cheaper than a fully-loaded Windows.īottom line: The cat’s out of the bag and there’s no way they can force it back in. ![]() Rather than counting on their eula to protect them from this, they really should have either stayed with PPC/Openfirmware (in which case running OS X on standard PCs would be a non-issue) or have made plans to deal with this situation effectively, either by licensing the right to create Mac-compatible clones or by not restricting the installation of OS X but offering no support to those who install it on a non-Apple configuration. The second they moved to using standard PC hardware, this was inevitably going to happen. ![]() Obviously, Apple did not see this coming, and they should have. They can start putting DRM chips in their machines or implement other forms of DRM or activation, and that will be cracked or bypassed within weeks. They can start restricting how OS X is sold, but that will be worked around. They can’t go after every one of these companies, in every country (some of which they have no legal authority) without throwing huge expendatures of money at the problem and likely failing or at the very least only partly succeeding. This is why Apple is just going to have to adapt. Soon enough every country will have a company like this.
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