Hackintosh maker gets legal greeting from Apple
Psystar sued for ruining perfection
As was inevitable, hackintosh vendor Psystar has found itself on Apple's legal to-do list.
Apple has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the open hardware manufacturer, which began raising eyebrows by offering a $400 computer capable of running copies of Mac OS X.
Psystar Open Computer
The legal grievances were filed July 3 in US District Court in Northern California. Details at the moment are scant with both companies tight-lipped about the lawsuit and the electronic complaint currently unavailable. But ZDnet folk with their mitts on a hard copy, say it's the standard don't touch our merchandise legal rhetoric. The suit alleges violations of Apple's shrink wrap license, copyright and trademark.
Psystar calls itself "an alternative to pricey Apple hardware." It's cheapest box capable of running OS X combines a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of DDR 2 memory, and integrated Intel GMA950 graphics and goes for $555 with the addition of Leopard pre-installed.
This is allegedly a violation of Apple's OS X end-user license, which states the operating system is only licensed for use on Apple-branded hardware.
Psystar argues that Apple's licensing terms are unlawful because they're anti-competitive. Looks like they'll have a chance to put this view to the test soonish. ®
COMMENTS
@ac 'proof'
The word you are looking for is PROVE FFS!
Mines the one with 'spelltard' on the back
re: strawberry flavoured
The UNIX trademark doesn't really mean anything from a technology point of view. You could obtain the mark for just about any operating system, Unix-like or not.
Compliance with the POSIX standard is generally accepted as a proper test whether an operating system is a Unix system (in the technology sense, not the trademark sense). Today, most systems are POSIX compliant or near POSIX compliant (leaving out some optional POSIX specs which are not mandatory), including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X and OpenSolaris.
AT&T vs BSD
"The BSD project, based at the University of California, also produced a kernel and userland utilities which were intended to be freely redistributable. Some parts were already in the public domain; others had to be rewritten from scratch to remove code on which AT&T had asserted copyright."
Perhaps one should also note that when AT&T brought its lawsuit against the University of Berkeley over copyright violations in the BSD code, the outcome was rather embarrassing for AT&T because only very little code was found to be copied from AT&T whilst a much larger amount of code in AT&T's Unix code was found to have been copied from BSD without giving the necessary credit that the BSD license demands.
@ Mark Pardington, Aimee and others
The Linux kernel was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds. It was initially released under a restrictive licence which prevented any commercial use. RMS convinced Linus to re-licence it under the GPL.
The "userland utilities" -- i.e. basic filesystem commands such as ls, cd, mv; simple applications such as the vi editor; the C compiler and the "bash" shell -- supplied with the Linux kernel are generally taken from the GNU project (an ongoing effort to create a complete Free Software alternative to Unix; which rapidly shifted its aim from seeking mere parity, to seeking to chew up and spit out). Hence the name GNU/Linux. The GNU utilities were generally modelled on System V (which at the time was not freely redistributable) but were rewritten from scratch by RMS and others. They are licenced under the "not sharing is theft" GPL -- basically the only thing you are not allowed to do is distribute binaries only without access to the Source Code.
The BSD project, based at the University of California, also produced a kernel and userland utilities which were intended to be freely redistributable. Some parts were already in the public domain; others had to be rewritten from scratch to remove code on which AT&T had asserted copyright. The BSD project used their own, "sharing is not theft" licence which, *unlike* the GPL, *allows* derivative works to be distributed without Source Code.
The commands work similarly between different implementations, but not absolutely identically; and the options can be very different.
The name "Unix" is a trademark and before it can be applied to an OS, a licence is required from the holders of the trademark. They will happily grant such a licence to anyone who submits their OS for a worthiness test (which amounts to little more than "does it have the fork() system call?") -- and pays the appropriate fee, naturally. Those who have not paid for the label can only describe operating systems which might pass the relevant tests as "Unix-like", and we have all learned from an early age that "strawberry flavour" does not necessarily imply something that tastes very much like strawberries.
As you might expect where things evolved separately in parallel, the history of the various "Unix-like" operating systems is very complex, with unexpected connections and twists and turns all over the place. Someone drew a really good diagram once. It's probably still on the Internet somewhere.
@ Mark Pardington
"Every command you typed, the layout of the filesystem, the "Kernel" are all the same as Linux, ..."
Not really, no.
Whilst there are many similarities (due to the common Unix heritage), neither the commands nor the filesystem layout nor the kernel are "all the same as Linux".
Some commands are entirely different with different names and even if the commands share the same name, then it is not uncommon that the command options are different, which is one reason why the man pages for BSD and Linux are generally different.
As for filesystems, Linux distros usually default to EXT3, whilst BSD usually defaults to UFS, Darwin uses HFS+ Extended these days. The filesystem hierarchy is also different between Linux and BSD, similar, but different enough not to be called "all the same".
The kernels are not the same either. With the exception of MkLinux (probably now defunct) all Linux distros today use the Linux kernel which is why the OS is colloquially called Linux in the first place. The BSDs don't use the Linux kernel, they use kernels derived from the original University of Berkeley BSD kernel but each of the major BSDs have their own kernel now.
some further clarifications ...
"Also, look up the XNU Kernel, and its references to BSD ..."
The XNU kernel is not derived from BSD, it is a further development of the Mach kernel, orginally developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Apple has since added a BSD system call compatibility API to it but that doesn't make it a BSD kernel.
"The company jobs created the OS X GUI in, was called NeXT Software.. not so strangely NeXTs homepage now goes to apple.com"
Apple acquired NeXT Inc. in 1996 or 1997. However, the OSX GUI was not developed by NeXT, it was developed by Apple after acquiring NeXT. Apple used the NeXT kernel (originally derived from Mach), replaced the NeXT userland (derived from BSD 4.2) with the FreeBSD userland, the combination of which then became Darwin. Apple then ported parts of their Macintosh Toolbox API, which they named Carbon, further they used the NeXT application API, which they named Cocoa. Darwin together with these two APIs and a newly developed GUI, called Aqua, was then released in 2000 as MacOSX. Since then various API calls have been added to the XNU kernel, Carbon and Cocoa.
