Open Computers

We at TechWatch have been finding the current tussle between Apple and Psystar to be very interesting. For those of you who haven't been following, here's a brief recap. Psystar back in April of this year announced that they were going to sell computer configurations that were capable of running unmodified versions of Mac OS X.5. Had they only sold the hardware, they might have gotten away with it. But they also offered to sell retail copies of Mac OS X.5 and preinstall it for you. This is clearly against the End User License Agreement (EULA) of Mac OS X, which spells out that it can only be installed on genuine Apple hardware.

So Apple did what they thought they needed to do in order to protect their intellectual property (IP) and sued Psystar on the ides of July this year for eight counts of copyright infringement. This came as a shock to absolutely no one in the IT world. In fact, we at TechWatch wondered why it took Apple three full months to do so. Apple, in asking for a full recall of all of the computers sold by Psystar with their operating system on it, was going for the jugular.

Psystar this week has decided to not roll over and play dead. Instead, they've decided to go and countersue Apple claiming they (Apple) have violated the antitrust act and had monopolistic behaviours. The resolution of this conflict could set a precedence for years to come. If Apple is successful, then that paves the way for IT companies to build exclusionary products that all but guarantees a market segment will be locked into buying their products. If Psystar is successful, however, then it means that no matter what you try to innovate, someone else could come along and steal your work and sell it for less through channels that you don't control.

We haven't seen a lawsuit with so much riding on it since Darl McBride of SCO sued IBM for a billion dollars back in March of 2003 for allegedly incorporating Unix code into Linux. We anxiously await to see what the next steps will be between Apple and Psystar.