Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 02 September 2008 13:31
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
And keep in mind that the GPL and similar licences are built on the foundation of copyright. They provide certain rights to anyone who agrees to the terms, but copyright law provides the 'stick' that can be used against someone who breaches those terms.
Anyway, back to the specifics of Psystar's response.
Here's another good one: "PSYSTAR denies that it has advised, encouraged, and assisted others to breach the License Agreement; PSYSTAR has not advised consumers to acquire Mac OS X software and install, use, and run it on non-Apple-Labeled computers."
OK, so the company has sold computers with Mac OS X preinstalled - software that's only licensed for use on Apple-labeled hardware - and there's a sense in which that's not assisting others to breach the agreement?
Well, you could merely claim ignorance of the licence, even though copies came with the software that you were installing on customers' systems, or you could simply deny the validity of the licence, in which case your customers can't be breaking it.
But Psystar is not merely resisting Apple's legal attack, it has launched a counteroffensive of its own. The company has asserted that Apple has engaged in unfair and anticompetitive conduct by tying the use of Mac OS X to Apple's own hardware.
The idea is that Apple possesses monopoly power in the Mac OS market, that the Mac OS market is distinct from the "Mac OS Capable Computer Hardware Systems" market, and that the Mac market is distinct from the wider PC market.
So if Apple excludes the possibility of running Mac OS X on hardware supplied by other manufacturers, that constitutes unfair competition.
Psystar reckons neither Windows nor Linux are "a viable substitue" for Mac OS X - see
page four.
