Nothing and More

I wrote something that seemed to me, a very innocent question with regards to Mac OS X: Should Apple release it for non-Apple labeled computers? I gave my point of view. I listed the Pros and Cons of this course of action, with the clear notion this is just a utopian argument, because I don’t think Apple will do it.

Fear the clones

This is just a hypothesis, but I think it has some merit.

Imagine if you will:

“Joe Schmuck, buy some parts and make himself a computer, he decides he doesn’t want to run Windows, and well Linux and the BSD’s are just to damn difficult to install and maintain, so he has an epiphany, he decides to install the most user friendly OS in the planet, OS X. So he goes to the store, shells out $129, gets home, gets on the net prints out the instructions, and a few hours later, voila! OS X is running beautifully on his Chinese made discounted hardware (we know Apple uses top grade stuff).

It also happens that Joe Schmuck is a performance junky. He goes out and runs every benchmark known to man on his FrankenMac. Of course they are quite off the charts as would expected of a 8 cores + 8 gb of ram monster. In his fit of joy, he uploads the results to the web, and a few Mac Pro owners go about to prove to Joe Schmuck how a looser he is. To their dismay, they don’t match the performance of the FrankenMac, in fact they are quite below.

Of course happiness doesn’t ensue from such a situation. While this is totally fictional, I have not run any such benchmarks, don’t know of any yet, and it bears saying: I don’t personally believe in benchmarks, and don’t actually care one bit for them, non the less I know there are others that really care with a passion about this.

These people will not be happy at all.

Vertical Integration

Some believe this is the reason of the success of the Mac’s and OS X, I am an old fart system programmer, and thus believe, that credit lies in the foresight of using a Unix based core, but that’s just me. How ever I do admit that the tightly coupling of software and hardware has it’s benefit. But this doesn’t preclude Apple from releasing OS X to the non-Apple masses, so they can convert. I hear the cries of the utter world annihilation if the do this, but I’m still not convinced.

Sun Microsystems faced a situation similar to the one Apple is facing now with their Solaris OS. They decided to make it available for all who are willing to pay, with the very big caveat: the hardware had to be SUN certified. In other words they have an HCL list with hardware that is known to work with the OS in a stable and scalable manner. New hardware is being added every day, thanks to users, who are willing to test on officially unsupported hardware, but the user’s HCL is not official. There is no support for that, except for the community forums.

At this juncture, you can download a DVD with a full hacked and install ready version of Leopard 10.5.2, that will work on most Dell, HP, and even Asus branded computer. There are user made HCL lists in the web, you can find help on doing this in a lot of places in the web. If you want to at least have the license to avoid Copyright issues, you can do the install directly out of the box, with a few tweaks (don’t know the particulars, just know there are people doing this).

Running around the bench

Crack the Crackers

Apple has several ways to mitigate these problems. The one that most people expect is a technical solution. This might work in the short term, but Apple will need to continue devoting development, and research time, to mitigate it, and people will continue to break or work around those limitations, most will do it just for the fun of it. The cycle continues until one of them quits. Guess who the odds favor?

Playing the Court Game

They also have option of trying their EULA in court, or look for some obscure patent infringement etc.. But this is a costly approach, and might actually add more wood to the fire. Ultimately this will stop those who try to make a profit from the Apple brand and its products. But I don’t think it will stop the Joe Schmucks with high IQ and a 100 degrees of boredom, from continue the quest, and making it available.

I think there is proof, that suing people wont make Piracy go away or diminish it. That is if you get to make a compelling case to not be thrown out of court.

The final frontier

I think we all can add to the list above, so I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.