apple killed pystar by being able to limit what hardware it's software runs on

Posted Apr 7, 2010 6:17 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263)
In reply to: apple killed pystar by being able to limit what hardware it's software runs on by pabs
Parent article: IBM and the labors of TurboHercules

Pamela of Groklaw, for one.

apple killed pystar by being able to limit what hardware it's software runs on

Posted Apr 7, 2010 6:22 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (7 responses)

Groklaw (Pamala and many other posters there) were _very_ vocal about this, but from other sources I was hearing either support for Apple (mostly mild, but support), or deafening silence. I don't remember hearing anyone supporting Pystar, either as official orginizations or individually

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 7, 2010 6:53 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (6 responses)

If Psystar had done its due diligence before entering into such a risky
enterprise (and had better legal counsel) it is quite possible that they
could have won, because U.S. copyright law allows the legitimate owner of a
copy of software, or their authorized agents, to make an adaptation necessary
to run software on a machine. That and a successful establishment of the
gratuitous nature of retail shrinkwrap "licenses" in the case could have
allowed them to prevail.

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 7, 2010 19:43 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (5 responses)

They tried that approach, the Judge told them he wouldn't let them use it as a defense.

PJ and the apple lovers have always been wrong about apple, but do you see PJ doing any articles on Apple suing HTC over Android and how it's a direct attack on Linux? Nope. There is a very large group of FOSS supporters that like Apple and have no Idea how much Job's hates FOSS, and he does hate it.

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 8, 2010 11:47 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't think Jobs hates free software per se. He hates loss of control, and he hates having people muscling in on a lucrative near-monopoly -- but he plainly has no objections to e.g. GCC (at least when it was GPLv2-or-above licensed).

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:53 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

My view is he doesn't mind FOSS as long as he can use it, but if it starts competing against him he will attempt to destroy it. Mark my words, Apple will eventually sue a FOSS company using software patents. He's already directly sued Linux but through HTC.

I wouldn't be surprised if in some future period RedHat or Ubuntu started eating into Apple market share and Apple then launched a suit against them. He's clearly hostile to FOSS if it competes against Apple in any way. From some of the interviews I've read he's extremely quick to threaten with lawyers. Has everyone forgotten that he sued MS over the look and feel of Windows? Half the patents he sued HTC over are absolutely ridiculous, the equivalent in the physical world would be patents on the location of a switch, frankly I'm astounded the patent office granted them. The key point is he will use them as weapons, far more quickly than MS will.

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 8, 2010 17:15 UTC (Thu) by yanfali (subscriber, #2949) [Link]

Apple, like most commercial software companies, would prefer LGPL, BSD, MIT or Apache style licenses. GCC is a major thorn for them, which is why they've made extensive investments in LLVM and Clang.

It's also highly likely that Webkit, their fork of KHTML, was attractive because of it's LGPL license.

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 10, 2010 8:43 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Would that be the same Jobs whose NeXT wanted to subvert the GPL licence on GCC by distributing their Objective-C frontend as binary only files?

Apple killed Psystar

Posted Apr 10, 2010 12:36 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes, but they couldn't do that, and when that was made clear to them they assigned ObjC to the FSF, which they could have chosen not to do.