Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 23 July 2008 04:22
Opinion and Analysis
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The company does not actually sell Mac OS X: "OS X Leopard Will not be pre-installed or included. Instead you can install it yourself using our easy Do-it-yourself kit. All other Operating System will be preinstalled."
This is presumably an attempt to avoid attention from Apple's lawyers. However, it may not be enough.
Apple's suit against Psystar includes a claim that the latter induced breach of contract in that it "has advised, encouraged and assisted others to breach the License Agreement by, among other things, encouraging those consumers to acquire Mac OS X software and then assisting them to install, use and run it on non-Apple-labeled computers. In doing so Psystar has unlawfully induced breach of the Licence Agreement by others."
While this claim has yet to be tested in court, similar language could be used to describe Open Tech's provision of an "easy Do-it-yourself kit" for installing Mac OS X, even if the company isn't preinstalling or even selling Apple's operating system.
Perhaps the only legally safe way for a would-be 'cloner' to go might be to offer an appropriately configured system and then quietly and anonymously let it be known in hackintosh circles that the installation kit can be downloaded from certain servers.
Of course, that lacks the appeal of Psystar's approach which delivers a PC built from generic components that boots straight into Mac OS X when you turn it on, but unless Apple loses to Psystar in court it's hard to see how a company can combine that sort of market appeal without running foul of the legal niceties.
Open Tech itself is a bit of a mystery. The company's web site provides no contact details beyond email addresses, so we have no idea of which country the business operates from or where it is incorporated. (There's no indication that it is the Open Tech of Blacksburg, Virginia, which develops virtual reality software for scientific visualisation.) Furthermore, the site runs on a free hosting service and uses a .tk domain name.
.tk - what's that? Find out on
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