Psystar: It's dead, Steve

Jake Widman
Thursday, 17 December 2009 03:17

IT Industry - Strategy

Apple has succeeded in gaining a permanent injunction against Mac clonemaker Psystar from selling computers with any version of OS X installed. The court also declined to exclude Rebel EFI, Psystar's software that enables an end user to install OS X on a non-Apple machine, from the injunction.

To recap: Psystar started selling generic Intel PCs with Mac OS X preinstalled in April 2008. Apple sued in the Northern California U.S. District Court and in November won a summary judgment against Psystar.

Apple followed up on that victory with a request for a permanent injunction preventing Psystar from selling clones with any version of OS X; Psystar had argued that since the original suit was filed before OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) came out, that later operating system wasn't covered by the judgment.

Furthermore, Psystar had in the meantime started selling Rebel EFI, a software package that let end users install Snow Leopard on generic boxes themselves. Psystar asked that Rebel EFI be specifically excluded from any injunction, on the grounds that software products weren't part of the litigation.

The California judge didn't buy either of those arguments. In his Order Granting Motion for Permanent Injunction (PDF download from the Groklaw blog), Judge William Alsup ruled that Snow Leopard should reasonable be included in the injunction, and that it would be inappropriate to explicitly exempt Rebel EFI.

The judge did agree that Apple had lent some weight to Psystar's argument about Snow Leopard by excluding it from the original discovery period (when it wasn't out yet) and calling it "irrelevant" to the case.

After Snow Leopard was released, however, and Psystar filed a suit in Florida (its home state) asking for explicit permission to sell Snow Leopard clones and Rebel EFI, Apple suddenly asked to have Snow Leopard added back in to the California case.

For the judge's reaction and more on the decision, see Page 2.