Psystar Antitrust Claim Against Apple Dismissed 256
CNet has a report that a federal judge has dismissed Psystar's antitrust suit against Apple. Observers had said that the counter-suit embodied the Mac clone-maker's best chance of prevailing and staying in business. We've been following Psystar and the dueling lawsuits since the beginning.
Re:As much as I dislike Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
yes but free as in freedom not free as in beer.
btw i take it you new here.
Re:As much as I dislike Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
Other than that I do not think they have ever done anything other than what the licences were meant to allow them to do.
Re:As much as I dislike Apple... (Score:1, Informative)
What does the GPL have to do with Apple or their operating system? Mac OS X is based on BSD.
Still, the BSD license does allow software distributed under it to be sold with or without offering source code or contributing back, so Apple is fully within their rights to sell Mac OS X. I'm just pointing out that you were referring to the wrong license.
Mac OS Forge (Score:3, Informative)
Well you can get all the sources here:
http://www.macosforge.org/ [macosforge.org]
And especially zfs and launchd could be interesting to Linux and BSD. But then the Linux community suffers heavily from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
Apple and GPL (Score:5, Informative)
There is quite a bit of GPL licensed software in Mac OS X. Your can download the sources for that part of OS X here:
http://www.macosforge.org/ [macosforge.org]
The sources to the BSD part of Mac OS X is there as well. And some of Apples own developments on top (launchd - Apples answer to init, cron and inetd - for example). launchd is pretty cool btw.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I wish they could win (Score:3, Informative)
However, the other part of the Sherman Act (illegal tying) was still not addressed. From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) [wikipedia.org]
(emphasis added).
Since you can buy OS X without having to buy an Apple Computer and since OS X will run on non-Apple hardware, it is illegal tying especially since it is a contract only (EULA) that prevents you from running on non-Apple hardware. Whether or not Pystar pursued this line I have no idea.
Re:As much as I dislike Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
They started with BSD code. Which is released under a BSD license which expressly allows this. What's the problem? You are free to make money off that stuff too if you like.
You can do that with Apache stuff too. Some OSS licenses expressly allow you to use their stuff as a basis for your own stuff. This is a good thing.
Cheers
Re:Tying Arrangement (Score:3, Informative)
Once they buy it though, THEY OWN THE PRODUCT...
No, they don't because they never bought the software. They licensed the software with the license being null and void if they violate their end of the contract.
...and are free to do with it as they wish.
Just as long as they are willing to live with the potential consequences of their actions. Namely, the potential to be sued by the other party in the contract for violating that contract. No one is forced to enter into the contract with Apple, but if they want to use Apple's software they will be legally obligated to abide by that contract.
Now, I don't believe that software should be licensed instead of sold, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm free to use any other OS on their hardware, or to use completely different hardware if I so choose, just not with their software. Companies are under no obligation to give you as many choices in configuration as you feel entitled to. If you don't like the options provided by Apple, use a different vendor. Whining about it is just juvenile.
Re:Tying Arrangement (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know if the AutoCAD EULA contained prohibitions against re-selling the license. If they did, then that portion of the EULA would have been invalidated by the decision. However, that doesn't mean that the rest of the EULA was invalidated as well.
Re:Tying Arrangement (Score:3, Informative)
Since the judge hasn't bought their argument, the Clayton Act doesn't apply, no matter how much any of us may want it to.
Re:I'm glad they lost (Score:3, Informative)
If the minimum wage employees at Best Buy tell you they are selling you software then they are wrong. It has become a common convention to refer to software license sales as software sales because in the vast majority of cases the result is the same.
The legal distinction exists for those who try to use the software in a way other than intended by running it on unapproved hardware or installing the software on more machines than the license allows. Many users routinely install software on multiple machines despite only having purchased a single user license and they don't normally get prosecuted because of the bad blood this would cause between the vendor and the user. That doesn't mean they don't have the right to do so, just that they realize it's better not to.
Re:Comparison... (Score:3, Informative)
If Microsoft released Windows 7 and only allowed it to be installed and run on Microsoft branded machines, how long would that last? About ten seconds, yes?
Yes.
Then why the hell can Apple get away with it?
Because Microsoft has a monopoly and is subject to anti-trust laws while Apple doesn't and isn't.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Apple fanboy--in fact, I tend towards mild dislike, and own none of their products--and I'm not even quite sure who I'm rooting for in this case (which is far from done), but I still have to admit that talking about a monopoly "in OS/X" is stretching things too far. I'd rather see PyStar lose this argument and then end up winning the whole case based on the doctrine of first sale or something similar. But I also admit that it's not necessarily quite that simple, and Apple may indeed have a valid case. I hope they lose, but I can understand why they might win, and don't think it would be the end of the world, unlike the look-and-feel cases back in the eighties, where I think it might actually have been the end of the world, or at least, the end of creative freedom, if they'd won (fortunately, they lost those ones).
Apple may be dicks (I think there's a pretty strong case to be made for that proposition), but they're not monopolists (although I tend to think they'd be even scarier than MS if they were).
Re:I wish they could win (Score:3, Informative)
Labelling the packages "Upgrade" but not enforcing any kind of technical measure against clean installs is called lying.
Nonsense. If so, selling a music CD with a copyright notice but no DRM to stop you ripping and uploading it is also "lying". I don't think so. Before product activation became commonplace most commercial software did nothing to enforce its license. Lots of publishers sell software "for educational use only" at a discount - the license says you can't use it for commercial purposes, but there's nothing to enforce it.
(See also "Internet Explorer is an integral part of Windows" [cnet.com].)
MS were accused of monopoly abuse by bundling IE with windows, and trying to claim that it was technically impossible to remove it. How do you get from there to "you can't impose a license condition without backing it up with a technological measure"?
Anyway, Microsoft has a near-monopoly in personal computer operating system market - so anti-trust law allows the courts to poke their nose into what they sell to who and for how much.
TFA was all about Psystar being laughed out of court for trying to argue that Apple were a monopoly - because only Apple made Apple products - and could therefore be told what they had to sell to whom and for how much. Apple don't have a monopoly. The reason that it sometimes seems that there is one law for MS and another law for Apple is because there is.
Re:I wish they could win (Score:4, Informative)
You quoted only part of the text, and missed the critical bit.
Certain tying arrangements are illegal in the United States under both the Sherman Antitrust Act, and Section 3 of the Clayton Act. A tying arrangement is defined as "an agreement by a party to sell one product but only on the condition that the buyer also purchases a different (or tied) product, or at least agrees he will not purchase the product from any other supplier." Tying may be the action of several companies as well as the work of just one firm. Success on a tying claim typically requires proof of four elements:
(1) two separate products or services are involved;
(2) the purchase of the tying product is conditioned on the additional purchase of the tied product;
(3) the seller has sufficient market power in the market for the tying product;
(4) a not insubstantial amount of interstate commerce in the tied product market is affected.
Look at point 3 - "sufficient market power."
Apple do *not* have sufficient market power (which is usually triggered by monopoly status) and therefore are not subject to laws against tying.
Monopoly status (or 'sufficient market power') triggers a whole raft of conditions which are not an issue before that point.