http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6040983.html

There are a number of discussion board sites devoted to trying to run Apple Intel-Mac OSX-86 on non-Apple hardware. Apple has now used a DMCA Cease and Desist order to get the boards (but not the rest of the sites) closed down.

Apple clearly has the right to do this under US law. But it's pretty dumb isn't it? It was absolutely inevitable that people would attempt to hack OSX so that it would boot on a non-Apple Intel-86 machine. Trying to keep a lid on this by attacking hobbyist sites feels like a Canute operation. Now as others have said running OSX on non-apple with no support is never going to be a mainstream activity or terribly sensible beyond being able to say "look at what I did". It's hard for me to see where Apple loses providing there's just enough control to force people to buy Apple hardware if they want OSX.

This just looks like a source of bad press.

But it opens up a wider issue. Exactly what will Apple have to do to tie their software to their hardware? And what implications does it have for the rest of us when Intel help Microsoft to do the same thing. The argument gets thinner, but OSX depends to a very great extent on OSS and Linux. What happens when you can't run Linux on commodity Intel hardware because it's all got hardware ties to commercial operating systems? At which point I should add that it's very hard to run XP or Linux on macintels, but it has almost been done.

Oh, and "Just Say No To DRM". Even and perhaps especially if it's in the operating system.


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[ 18-Feb-06 10:36am ] [ , ]