An entrepreneurial Mac vendor has gone offline just hours after it was discovered selling Mac OS X Leopard desktops from a company not named Apple.
MacRumors.com, along with many others, noted one of those too-good-to-be-true deals from a company called Psystar on Sunday night and Monday morning. Psystar, until just now, had been offering $554 "Open Mac" desktops on its Web site with Intel processors, 2GB of memory, a DVD drive, and a copy of Mac OS X Leopard.
The thing is, Apple's software license for Leopard, and any version of Mac OS X, requires that the operating system only run on Apple hardware. Psytar acknowledged the OSx86 project was the inspiration for the Open Mac, and noted their systems require "minimal patching" to run Leopard, according to MacRumors. By the time I got in this morning Psystar's Web site was offline, and the company is likely considering its legal options at this hour. A Google-cached copy may or may not be available here, it was loading very, very slowly when I tried it.
For years PC DIYers and companies like Dell have begged Apple to offer a copy of Mac OS X up for licensing on non-Apple hardware, but Apple hasn't even entertained the idea, as far as we can tell. As much as the hardware industry might want another alternative to Windows, many of the reasons that Leopard is attractive might have a lot to do with the fact that it's designed to work on a limited number of hardware configurations.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
MacRumors.com, along with many others, noted one of those too-good-to-be-true deals from a company called Psystar on Sunday night and Monday morning. Psystar, until just now, had been offering $554 "Open Mac" desktops on its Web site with Intel processors, 2GB of memory, a DVD drive, and a copy of Mac OS X Leopard.
The thing is, Apple's software license for Leopard, and any version of Mac OS X, requires that the operating system only run on Apple hardware. Psytar acknowledged the OSx86 project was the inspiration for the Open Mac, and noted their systems require "minimal patching" to run Leopard, according to MacRumors. By the time I got in this morning Psystar's Web site was offline, and the company is likely considering its legal options at this hour. A Google-cached copy may or may not be available here, it was loading very, very slowly when I tried it.
For years PC DIYers and companies like Dell have begged Apple to offer a copy of Mac OS X up for licensing on non-Apple hardware, but Apple hasn't even entertained the idea, as far as we can tell. As much as the hardware industry might want another alternative to Windows, many of the reasons that Leopard is attractive might have a lot to do with the fact that it's designed to work on a limited number of hardware configurations.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
LinksMarker is a Web 2.0 content management system
Comments