Submitted by When Psystar announced it Rebel EFI package, the company was quickly accused of simply taking open source code, repackaging it, and selling it for USD 50. While selling open source code is not a problem, not making the source code available if the license demands it is. Netkas, famous OSX86 hacker, and a Russian site are now claiming they have found the smoking gun.
Sadly, neither Netkas nor the Russian site are particularly proficient in Engish, so it’s not all entirely clear what’s going on here, but I’m taking them – Netkas especially – on their word when they say they have found evidence that Rebel EFI is based on open source boot-132 code. Apparently, the Darwin Universal Bootloader, the tool Psystar uses, contains the same strings as boot-132 and tools based on boot-132 (e.g. Chameleon).
That of course wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, if it weren’t for the fact that boot-132 is licensed under the Apple Public Source License, version 2. This is a license which contains a clause similar to the GPL in that when you ship modifications, you also have to provide the source code to anyone you shipped your product to. So far, Psystar has not done so, but it could theoretically be that if you ask them, they might provide it.
Now, I place a certain amount of trust in Netkas’ words, but his evidence isn’t necessarily conclusive. More investigations into the matter will have to be performed to get more conclusive evidence. The Russian site has more information, but sadly, even though I know the Cyrillic alphabet, I don’t know any Russian other than D"Y~NEURD°D^2D'D° and D"YDu~NEURDu~N~N‘~NEURD 3/4 D^1DoD°, and I know enough about translation to not place any form of trust in automated translations (hint to Russian OSAlert readers).
Assuming Netkas is right, this is of course a very bad thing. EULAs can fall off a cliff for all I care, but an open source license which covers distribution is a completely different thing, as any open source advocate and anyone with common sense will tell you. Breaking them constitutes a breach of copyright, which is a serious offence.
I’m not about ready to crucify Psystar just yet – first, let’s await their response to this matter, as they might theoretically provide the source code upon request. Second, we do need more evidence (or someone needs to properly translate the Russian page). In any case, it doesn’t look good.
On a side note, I just got home from the Apple retailer, where I bought me a copy of Snow Leopard. In the coming days I will test out Psystar’s whoever-owns-it Rebel EFI, and see if it’s any good.
Tell me it didn’t pass the following test
strings ./rebel-EFI | grep boot-123
People are surprised? from a group of scum only scum can from them. I find it funny that people here are jumping around all excited about them being the ‘knight and shining armer’ when yet again, like EFI-X, yet another company riding on the coat tails of another persons/organisations hard work. Not only do they ride on the coat tails of Apples success, they do it off the back of a hard work done by unpaid enthusiasts. Yet another example of when if you can’t trust a group to respect one groups hard work, how do you expect them to respect anyones hard work.
It has gone form a small group of enthusiasts sharing their experience and developing some work arounds to a group of people who have taken their hard work and NEVER contributed anything back. Screwing over Apple is one thing but it is completely different thing to do what Pystar have done. But like I said, given the shady businesses practices of Pystar, I’m not surprised it happened.
This is a company that put their necks on the line to support an idea that they think is right – that they can resell software they purchased if they want to. How can you so easily dismiss such an act, even if you disagree with them about whether they should have that right nor not (you seem to be on the side of not).
Pystar is a hardware company daring to ship OSX pre installed – if it took OSS to do it, that’s even better, it demonstrates the power of the open source philosophy. The only gripe is with their disclosure practices, and it remains to be seen how they’ll respond to this (I do have my doubts about whether they’ll respond appropriately).
On the other hand, this could be just a skeezy company, trying to make a quick buck – on the other other hand they are fighting a tough and expensive court battle, and could just have been trying to get some warchest funds.
In any case, I don’t see how to put them in a tiny box so easily – this is a fairly complicated matter, IMHO.
well, if you make an agreement that you’re not going to use macosx on a non-Apple computer and then you use macosx on a non-Apple computer, you are breaking your agreement.
Apple isn’t interested in open hardware. So why not just leave them alone and reward those that *are* interested?
How many times do we have to remind people that Apple is a hardware company? Of course, they’re not interested in someone else selling competing hardware.
They also don’t want to have to deal with 5 zillion hardware/driver configurations.
I’ve never really bought that argument. I don’t see why OS X should ever have worse driver availability than Free BSD. (I’m not trolling; seriously!) It just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, I can already use any nVidia card, and any arbitrary RAM and SATA drive, right? How many on-board networking and sound chipsets are out there that FreeBSD doesn’t have a working driver for?
Edit: Hell, for that matter, they could just have some kind of “Apple Compatible!” branding scheme, so that customers would know up-front at-a-glance when they buy a component if it’d work well with OS X. Then, Apple could sell OS X and let you install it on any machine, and you’d be able to pick hardware you’d know would work well – you’d just be limited to the narrow selection of third-party components that get certified. Point being, if Apple won’t sell OS X independant of their hardware, I doubt it’s because they’re deathly afraid of driver problems.
Edited 2009-10-28 23:18 UTC
Huh? Why would FreeBSD drivers work in OS X apart, perhaps, from networking drivers? OS X is not FreeBSD though it has borrowed several parts from it such as the networking stack and BSD userland. It doesn’t use the FreeBSD kernel however, so unless there’s a FreeBSD compatibility layer for all FreeBSD drivers it makes no sense that they would work. They could likely be ported rather easily, but to expect them to just work in OS X is unreasonable.
That’s my point. I did not necessarily mean that OS X should be able to load a FreeBSD kernel module, or however they do it, but that drivers from FreeBSD should be pretty easy to adapt, and I highly doubt AAPL would be shy about it.
How many times does this have to be explained? OSX is NOT a FreeBSD distro. The userland is from FreeBSD and that was mainly due to the old 4.3BSD-based userland from NeXT being a bit stale in the late 90’s.
OS X drivers have nothing in common with FreeBSD drivers. OSX uses IOKit-based drivers.
OSX is a bastardized Mach/BSD/OpenStep hybrid.
those damn bastardOS
When I was still using windows, when XP came out, there was something called driver signing where Microsoft would certify certain drivers.
But I have never found any signed driver afterword… So I would guess it was a good idea, but that the work required by microsoft or hardware vendors was just too much. It was not worth it.
Applying this to Apple would probably result in the same thing.
Driver signing is much more important now, especially if you’re using 64-bit Windows Vista or later since no driver will install without being signed unless a registry hack is applied. They don’t apply this to 32-bit Windows since there are so many more drivers from the XP era that people still use.
Ok thanx for clarification. I did not used windows for a long time…
They probably want to start fresh and force things to be correct on 64 bits since 32 bit is quite a mess already.
I guess it is a good thing since crappy drivers are the number one reason for unstable system, as the bsod have previously shown… Good driver means better experience.
Ah, that old scare tactic: “Now Apple must support every piece of hardware and every combination of them!!1!1!!1”
It does not. Apple has no obligation to support installing Mac OS X on non-Apple labelled machines – it just shouldn’t use legally dubious tactics (EULA) to prevent it.
I don’t see what is legally dubious about a EULA. If you don’t like the EULA then buy something else that doesn’t have one.
Apple doesn’t have to support non-macs but once these non-macs take over significant share, Apple will have to deal with the new reality. You know that Microsoft looks bad every time they release a new OS because of 3rd party drivers that don’t work anymore. People will blame the OS company.
What’s legally dubious about an EULA is the fact that they’re restrictions placed on a product after the sale. If you signed the EULA before handing any money over and the product came without the software installed then it might be a different story, but as it stands EULAs aren’t enforceable in most of the world, specially not on operating systems which come pre-installed.
How many times do we have to remind people that Microsoft is a software company? Of course they’re not interested in someone else selling competing software.
This is why they should not be obliged to allow anyone to install competing products on Windows, like different browsers, or OpenOffice.
Oh, sorry, for a moment I forgot. This is Apple, so of course the rules are different. Different matter altogether. Sorry about that.
They argue that they didn’t enter into any agreement, not to resell the software they purchased. It’s that EULA thing, either you think it’s a contract, or you think it’s BS. I tend to think it’s BS.
That said, buying software isn’t the same as buying a car. for one, when I buy a car from someone, the original owner loses possession of the car. Not so with software. Also, software (like music) is an infinite good – and thus probably needs some form of protection above physical goods. But a EULA – something like a contract, that end users automatically agree to when they install software or open a package – NO.
We call that copyright.
Yes, and what Psystar is doing doesn’t violate copyright, since they are only reselling.
All that has gone on up till now may have been ‘complicated’, but if they violated an open-source license when they made this Rebel thing, then the situation will instantly become crystal clear to a lot of people, including folks who don’t even care about Apple and their stuff.
The ends do not justify the means.
This company hasn’t put jack squat on the line, they are trying to make money from other people’s work: Apple and the OSX86 community namely.
Trying to turn that into some sort of valiant effort is mighty disingenuous, at best.
Uh, that’s what EVERY company does….makes money off the work of others, whether by those directly employed by them, thru licensing, theft of trade secrets or research and development.
All Pystar has done is to take an OSS bootloader, made it easier to use than the OSS version and charged a fee for it. More power to them. There have been plenty of companies who’ve used this same model to market their own flavor of Linux but I don’t hear you Apple Fanboys whining about that!
Certainly, butnux vendors didn’t try to cover it up and further provided the source for all components they were required to. True, their proprietary configuration tools weren’t always open but that’s well within their rights if they developed it themselves. Psystar is violating the license by not providing the source and by not including a copy of the APSL with their product. They do not necessarily need to provide all the source to Rebel EFI if there are parts they developed in house that are not modifications to existing components, but they do have to provide the source to the APSL-covered components they’ve modified. Let’s wait a bit and see if they come through on that.
No that is not “what every company does” companies pay employees salaries, or they pay for the IP if they get stuff not made in house, or at the very least they try to abide by the terms of the license if they are adopting open source code. And if they don’t they get sued, which is what is happening to these fools via Apple.
Some of you must really be living in the basement of your parents if you think this is how companies carry out business. Seriously.
The strong reaction of repulse by the OSX86 guys behind a lot of the stuff Pisstar stole (Netkas et al) is a clear proof these idiots didn’t even bother asking for permission.
Edited 2009-10-29 00:31 UTC
I don’t know. Taking on a large court case like this does open them up to substantial financial and legal risk. Maybe not as big as is perceived, but surely there’s risk involved.
Scum? WTF. Seriously, man, it’s not cool labeling them “scum” because you disapprove of their dealings with Apple. I can think of a lot of reasons to label Apple with the same moniker, given the sleazy things they do on a daily basis.
Please list these things that Apple does that puts them in the same level as Pysstar.
Geez … where to begin…
Locking down the iPhone so that only “approved” apps can run
Changing the iPod protocols to prevent interoperability
Force-feeding iTunes users with unnecessary and unwanted additional Apple software (Safari)
Packaging Quicktime security updates with iTunes
Designing iPod battery so that you have to return the unit to get a replacement
Rejecting Google Voice and other iPhone apps that compete with Apple
Suing enthusiast websites for releasing pre-release product information
Suing enthusiast websites containing “iPod” in their domain names
Sleazily backdating stock options for Apple executives
Including a “kill switch” in the iPhone for any mod/app that Apple doesn’t approve
Misappropriating work from artists such as Christian Marclay and Postal Service for use in their commercials
Outright lying in almost every Mac vs PC ad.
… there’s plenty more, but you get the gist.
Not sure I’d call that sleazy in and of itself. What makes it less than ideal is their inconsistent application of their own policies. If they were consistent, and followed the same rules with every approval/rejection, most people would probably not be complaining about this. I’ve seen the results of installing an untested application on a windows mobile device, and it’s not a pretty picture if the app messes with files it shouldn’t.
Agreed, 100%. It’s far from illegal, but not nice at all.
Which they’ve corrected, and did so very soon after people complained I might add. I’m not convinced this was a concerted effort to force Safari on to Windows machines, it’s more likely an oversight on either the update packagers or administrators.
Um, why is that bad? iTunes relies on Quicktime for it’s media handling, after all, so it’s as vulnerable to quicktime security issues as quicktime itself. That’s like complaining if Microsoft puts security updates for DirectShow with windows media player.
Another one on which we agree.
See point 1 above. Notice that Skype didn’t get rejected. I’ve a feeling that, in the case of Google Voice, contracts and politics were involved despite everyone’s assertions to the contrary. Another example of inconsistently applying policy. Oh but of course, Google Voice hasn’t officially been rejected according to Apple, not that it means much given how long it has been.
Agreed again.
I don’t recall this one. Link please?
Proof please?
Every phone has a kill switch and if they don’t, carriers put them in anyway. How is that any worse on the iPhone than every other cel phone out there?
Evidence?
Every company stretches the truth about products, it’s called advertising. Still, what kind of outright lies have you seen? I must have missed those particular commercials. Advertising and marketing is a world of half-truths.
Because you don’t have to use iTunes in order to use Quicktime; therefore, it makes no sense to bundle iTunes with a Quicktime security update. It’s yet another sleazy way for Apple to get their crappy iTunes software on the machine.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/05/08/22/apple_targets_unautho…
This case is particularly sad and pointless. It amply demonstrates why people hate attorneys. Assholes.
http://www.macblogz.com/2008/10/07/apples-ruthless-legal-team-goes-…
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9003879/Apple_Steve_Jobs_kne…
Hold on a sec. That’s not true. Every phone does not have a kill switch for particular applications. I can write an app and put it on my WinMo phone, and neither Microsoft nor Sprint is going to be able to kill it.
http://www.kottke.org/07/03/artist-christian-marclay-says-that-appl…
http://old.onebiglibrary.net/obl/onebiglibrary.net/story/did-apple-…
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/21/apples-ad-sinks-to-such-great-lo…
I don’t have enough time in my day to list all of them. But, I’ll summarize. If you believe Apple, every PC is infested with malware, crashes constantly, loses data, etc, etc. None of these claims is particularly relevant to Microsoft’s modern operating systems. Worse, they ignore obvious problems in Apple’s own operating system. Do you think that Apple is going to mention the complete loss of data in Snow Leopard when a user interacts with Guest? Nope. They’ll keep pounding away with the same BS.
Edited 2009-10-29 07:31 UTC
Has anyone ever wanted to install Quicktime on Windows outside of installing iTunes?
(sarcasm, hyperbole…)
Except that what the OP said was “bundling quicktime security updates with iTunes.” Formed this way, the sentence reads that the issue was that quicktime updates were included with iTunes. If the point was actually that iTunes is being bundled with quicktime updates, then I’m in full agreement. However, that’s not how the sentence read to me. Word order is important in English.
You’re right. I could have formulated that sentence better.
Do you even know what that means?
Snideness ignored. Um, yeah, I do. It means pushing back the date that options were issued in order to get a more attractive option grant price. It’s also illegal.
Bzzt. It’s actually not illegal (or sleazy or whatever) to backdate stock options. It’s just a disclosure issue. When properly disclosed backdated stock options are now treated as discounted stock options by the IRS.
What this has to do with Psystar is beyond me though.
No duh. Apple didn’t disclose. Hence, the illegality.
You might want to try reading the thread.
True, tho there are ways around it. I don’t expect them to make it the default, but they shouldn’t try to stop those who want to from jailbreaking the devices, since its only a select few technically minded people who would want to do that.
agreed, there is no reason to use a proprietary protocol
While i agree with this, they’re competing against microsoft who use exactly the same dirty tactics.
You mean you have to install itunes to patch quicktime? or you have to install quicktime to use itunes? if the latter, its because itunes requires some of the libraries provided by quicktime…
There are third party suppliers of iphone batteries already…
Sounds just like any typical large corporation to me… as bad as apple can be, other companies do similar things and microsoft are usually much worse.
I apologize for some rewording I made to speed up the translation (and hope its better than one provided by Google
) I’m completely not familiar with the topic, so I might have got some terminology wrong.
—
Last week Psystar has announced its new software product called Rebel EFI. Priced at $50 it makes it easy to install Mac OS on computers not produced by Apple. There is a limited time evaluation version. Rebel EFI is an iso image. You can get detailed info on manufacturer’s site. Many news sites have overviews of Rebel EFI, but we are interested about its inner details. Recent scandal with EFiX makes one wonder, if this $50-priced piece of software is a revolutionary product, or it is built from what OSx86 community has already developed?
So, the disk contains only 3 files: osxlinuz, initrd D, rebelefi.pkg. osxlinuz is a modified ISOLINUX bootloader. initrd is an encrypted RAM disk image which is decrypted by osxlinuz. After that it is loaded into memory and bootloader located on the image is executed. I’m not sure if initrd is not encrypted, but I could not unpack it any in usual way. rebelefi.pkg is an installation package for MacOS, which installs application called Rebel EFI.app, which in turn installs all drivers necessary for your hardware and a bootloader. This functionality is available in paid version only.
Before we pay, let’s see what we have got for free. Author of tagmac.ru site who tested Rebel EFI has kindly agreed to provide output of kexstat under MacOS booted using Rebel EFI. It has revealed following interesting strings:
33 0 0x79f42000 0x4000 0x3000 com.psystar.OpenSMC (1.0.0d1) <13>
Looks like Psystar is a sinner and takes ideas from OSx86. For instance OpenSMC looks like FakeSMC from netkas. Let’s take a look if it is really the case. Using a simple trick I could get the contents of encrypted image. It contains:
1000he dsdt.bin
cdboot
cr600 dsdt.bin
eg31m-s2 dsdt.bin
ep35c-ds3r dsdt.bin
ep45-ds3r dsdt.bin
ep45-ud3p dsdt.bin
ex58-ud4p dsdt.bin
g31m-es2l dsdt.bin
g31m-s2l dsdt.bin
g41m-es2l dsdt.bin
Librarry
.bin files, as it is clear from their names, contain modified DSDT tables for motherboard produced by Gigabyte. There are also DSDT tables for two notebooks: Asus EeePC 1000HE and MSI CR 600. I did not thorougly check what modifications were made. At least they have applied a patch for RTC device that prevents reset of BIOS settings during launch of Snow Leopard. Also, I spotted a shameful overlook by Psystar engineers: they have removed CPU aliases in DSDT for Asus EeePC 1000HE, but did not update references to this aliases. In the end, CPU power management will work incorrectly and Sleep function won’t work.
Next, there’s cdboot. It is a loader. In Psystar’s terminology it is called DUBL — Darwin Universal Boot Loader. It is possible that it also based on OSx86 Chameleon project, but I cannot say for sure.
Library directory contains auxiliary stuff: bootloader graphics and kexts. Let’s look at them closer.
AppleACPIPS2Nub.kext
ApplePS2Controller.kext
AttansicL1eEthernet.kext
ElliottForceLegacyRTC.kext
IOATAFamily.kext
IONetworkingFamily.kext
nForceLAN.kext
NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
OpenAHCI.kext
OpenBlockStorage.kext
OpenCompatible.kext
OpenDevice.kext
OpenHaltRestart.kext
OpenIntelEthernet.kext
RealTekR1000.kext
We’re mostly interested in OpenDevice.kext (it is it shows up in kexstat logs as OpenSMC). After looking into info.plist, I could not find any configurations for SMC keys available in FakeSMC by netkas. Let’s load it in IDA Pro. Ok, we have the keys: REV , OSK0, OSK1, NATJ, MSSP, MSSD, NTOK, $Num, LSOF, LSSB. This list 100% coincides with list from FakeSMC. Let’s go further. Let’s try to find values corresponding to OSK0 and OSK1. They are not present in explicit form, but there’s a magic_passphrase method and a set of strings:
“(C)”, “(c)”, “a”, “an”, “Apple”, “better”, “Banana”, “blind”, “but”,
“by”, “check”, “Computer”, “Cuban”, “declined”, “dentist”, “do”, “Doctor”,
“dont”, “don’t”, “existing”, “for”, “found”, “great”, “guarded”, “hammer”,
“hard”, “hardware”, “he’d”, “his”, “Inc”, “karma”, “Mac”, “Microsoft”, “once”,
“OS”, “our”, “pirate”, “Please”, “please”, “psystar”, “ran”, “Really”, “so”,
“steal”, “that”, “that’s”, “There”, “these”, “to”, “today”, “uncool”, “user”,
“Venezuela”, “was”, “way”, “whined”, “windows”, “wood”, “words”, “work”,
“Your”, ” “, “!”, “:”, “,”, “.”, “\n”, “?”, “*”, “;”
by carefully looking at them, it is easy to find parts of famous phrase used in OKS0 and OKS1 keys.
I don’t know why would everyone pay 50 bucks if the said rebel efi is available only for a small set of hardware.Shooting themselves in the foot, looks like.
Edited 2009-10-28 15:23 UTC
Shame on this company – Psystar, whoever is behind the curtain.
Just in case nobody noticed: there is one comment in blog:
Just a small correction, you said something about osxlinuz being a modified isolinux, it’s a modified boot-132
I think we have a lot of evidence that Psystar used stolen software from OSX86 community.
So Rebel EFI is basically just boot-132 + Chameleon + some kexts from OSX86 community + an app which downloads drivers for you.
Edited 2009-10-28 15:55 UTC
Yup, thanks to the translation above it’s pretty much certain now. Bad Psystar, bad. They’ll have to provide sources.
I’m currently installing Snow Leopard on my non-Apple labelled computer, and Rebel EFI does its job fine – I couldn’t get the Snow Leopard installer to work using plain boot-132, so I’m happy. The installation is currently doing the actual installing, so it might still fail later on.
Of course, I’m not going to install Psystar’s DUB – instead, once the installation is done, I’ll install Chameleon, and not be bothered by time limits and registration issues.
> So, I’m not about ready to crucify Psystar
> just yet – first, let’s await their response
> to this matter, as they might theoretically
> provide the source code upon request. Second,
> we do need more evidence (or someone needs to
> properly translate the Russian page). In any
> case, it doesn’t look good.
Why was this posted at all? I know nothing about Psystar, but I have looked at licenses… and until a _customer_ buys their product, then _asks_ for the source… and they _aren’t_ given it… then Psystar has done nothing wrong. Right?
Neither the APSL nor the GPL say “you must make all source available to everyone on your web site”.
Uhm, they offer their product as a trial on their website, which everyone can download. Trial or no, the license still applies.
Because every once and then OSAlert likes to take the path of speculative (rather than fact-based) journalism, probably because it wins them the most page views.
Like I said above (and if you would’ve cared to read the comments, instead of starting the baseless attacks right away, you would’ve seen it), this product is available to everyone, and as such, all you need to do to be entitled to the source code is to download the free copy they offer on their website.
And as the article CLEARLY mentions, we need to wait for someone to actually request said code first, and see what they do.
No need to buy anything.
Edited 2009-10-28 17:01 UTC
Not talking about the comments, but what you wrote in the article. These are your own words:
If that’s not speculative, then pigs fly. Cheap shot Thom, really.
Well, there is enough reason to speculate! If the one of the main OSX86 hackers claims his open source code can be found in the Rebel EFI package, and shows proof to boot, then that is something serious – he’s not just some random forum poster.
However, as my article clearly states, I am NOT ready to crucify Psystar just yet – we need more evidence, and we need to wait for a response from Psystar.
There is nothing over-the-top or sensationalist here.
Indeed, there is nothing inaccurate in what you say. The nature of the post is merely speculative though, and that’s the only point that I made in my *alleged* attack.
I wasn’t talking about sensationalism, but since you bring it up, here is my take. By definition, a teaser is (obviously) meant to grab the reader’s attention, and you are good at writing them in a way that it makes you want to click on that “Read More” link. But when a teaser uses not well understood sources to infer assertions that the body of the article cannot substantiate but only speculate about, it then becomes sensationalist. One could argue that you are just too good at writing teasers…
It’s not; he’s absolutely right. If Psystar doesn’t provide source upon request, then we have a GPL violation. While actually getting a conviction in court against Psystar is another step you’d have to take, I’d say that, if they’re distributing a binary built from (possibly modified) Open Source’ed code without providing source on request, then they are obviously and unambiguously violating the GPL.
And do note the last paragraph you copied:
Given that Thom even said that, I don’t understand how you can call this “speculative” with any degree of sincerity.
Ehem… the license this thing is under is APSL, not GPL. But more importantly, the article provides no proof that Pystar rejected any request for the source code. In fact, the article provided no proof of anything at the time of was written.
This does not make the article any less speculative, but simply reinforces the fact that Thom had no conclusive proof of anything when he wrote the article, something that he admits himself with his own words in several other passages of the article.
If it’s true they are using code from the community (and I think they are), the source code must available for download, we don’t need to ask for it.
Also the license must be available for everyone to read it. I didn’t find any license in their website.
What news source would you compare OSAlert to? When doing an investigative report, there are always more questions than answers. In areas where technology intersects with the law, determining fault is very difficult thing to do in any case. Furthermore, License violations are not often admitted to by companies, unless they are publicly shamed by enough journalists and customers. OSAlert is reporting that there is some evidince for believe there may have been a violation. Hopefully, this will encourage others to dig further to find more evidience as well as encourage a response from the alleged infringer pystar.
Also, anyone doubt OSAlert’ editorial independence from its advertisers now? Pystar does advertise on the site, but as this article ( and your comment) indicates, they have been shown no mercy or preferential treatment.
I am sorry, but you can’t claim to be doing instigative journalism by building a case from a few posts in a language that you don’t even understand and then making numerous assumptions and/or posing what if scenarios that may or may not happen. That’s the exact definition of being speculative.
Obviously, we disagree. I stand by my previous statement. Its worth investigating and bringing to a larger audience.
I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to Psystar. I generally approve of what they do. But I have no great interest in running MacOSX myself.
But… Psystar announced this product 6 days ago. Right? Has anyone actually requested the source and been refused? If the source was requested 6 days ago and hasn’t been provided yet, it that noncompliance? If I request the source right now and get it an hour later… would that be 1 hour of noncompliace? Requiring formal “forgiveness” be given by the original copyright holder and all that crap before things are put back to rights?
Or have some OSAlert readers decided to grab their pitchforks and storm the castle prematurely… yet again? It’s not like the issue of delayed source code availability doesn’t arise at least weekly, accompanied by much frothing at the mouth by certain OSAlert readers.
I’m going to watch and wait a bit before screaming out my opinion on the matter.
Edited 2009-10-28 17:09 UTC
Yup, same here, as said in the article.
Then again, it is also a breach of the APSL if you do not include a copy of the license with the software in question – I have my copy of Rebel EFI, and as far as I can tell, there’s no copy of the license. That in and of itself is already a breach of the license.
That is, assuming Netkas is right, and in all honesty, there’s little reason to doubt him. He knows what he’s talking about.
Odd that Psystar would be so reckless while in the middle of a nasty court case with Apple. It has been claimed that they are “scum bags”. And yet, this is more suggestive of their being “stupid”, which is a different thing, entirely.
I can’t help but feel that there is more to this story than currently meets the eye.
So I will continue to watch and wait.
P.S. It is amusing to consider the possibility that Apple, or a rogue Apple employee or fan, hacked Psystar’s site and planted the download there, unbeknownst to them. In the bizarre world of the Apple-Psystar conflict, that would not be entirely beyond the pale.
Edited 2009-10-28 17:34 UTC
LMAO! Nice one Steve, I’m with you on it!
Having lived in Floriduh for 11 years, it’s totally possible that they’re both scummy and stupid. That’s not to say that everyone there is like that, but there are a lot of people working around the law constantly and the government often has no problem with it.
I couldn’t see a rogue Apple employee uploading something to Psystar’s site, but a Mac fanatic might as there is a lot of outrage amongst them right now.
“a lot of outrage amongst them”
There is? I haven’t read a paper today, maybe it is on the front page of USA Today?
“APPLE FANBOIS RANT AND RIOT OVER EVIL PSYSTAR”
They rant about everything (remotely pertaining to Apple), including when Apple doesn’t make the machines exactly the way they want.
You did know that Apple are the saviours of humanity, didn’t you? As a benevolent society, they are trusted not only with our data (see guest accounts on Snow Leopard) but with our first-born children. Then again, I’ve heard similar rumblings about Linus Torvalds, FSF/Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates.
“You did know that Apple are the saviours of humanity, didn’t you? As a benevolent society, they are trusted not only with our data (see guest accounts on Snow Leopard) but with our first-born children.”
yeah, it’s like they think they are like the government or something…
Sure, but they’re just like Amigans: a bit amusing but nothing anyone pays any real attention to.
“Amigans”? Is that another kind of “Freetard”?
Not necessarily, a lot of stupid people are scumbags because that is the only way they know how to cope with reality.
It’s no less plausible than the idea that Microsoft is secretly behind Psystar, as part of a sinister plot to undermine the GPL.
That proposition has never made sense. Why would Microsoft want to increase competition within the x86/x64 operating system market?
Perhaps Microsoft has been secretly taken over by the Robot Devil from Futurama.
“Ah-ha-ha, my ridiculously-circuitous plan is now one-quarter complete!”
At least for the GPL, as far as I know, and with various other disclaimers, you’re not only required to make source available when requested, but you’re also required to preserve the license notification, and present it when the program is run. If Psystar is using GPL’ed code and not reproducing the GPL license at some stage, they’re in violation already, even if they haven’t denied a code-request yet. Now, the APL may be different, that I don’t know.
Did you buy the ‘upgrade’ $29 version or the the full $199 version with iLife?
The 29 EUR version. The box says nowhere that it is an upgrade by the way, and doesn’t even list Leopard as a pre-requisite… The lovely girl at the Apple retailer didn’t notify me of anything either.
Also, this copy isn’t for me, it’s a gift for my father – he has an iMac. But of course, before giving it to him, I couldn’t help but try it out on my Atom box
.
In any case, the installation succeeded, and Snow Leopard ran, but the tool which downloads the proper drivers from Psystar requires me to pay up – and I’m not doing that. So, installing Ubuntu as we speak.
if you did a bit of research you would find out all those drivers are actually free and patched up from the community anyways that psystar are just reusing.
I know. I tried them too (I have quite the experience installing Mac OS X on a non-Apple labelled computer), but they didn’t work well. On top of that, Psystar’s DUB (whoever’s sources it may be built on) did boot my machine – Chameleon does not.
Weird stuff, but I’m too lazy and too short on time to figure it all out.
….and that’s what you’re really paying Pystar to do. I’m sure they will provide the source to those who ask for it. I too have spent countless hours installing OSX on non-Apple hardware and I’m willing to pay a little for something that has a higher success rate and takes less time than spend any more time loading OSX by the trial-and-error method.
And as I said earlier, if you don’t like or need this product, then don’t buy it. I could just as easily pay one of the OSX script kiddies on my block to install OSX on my Dell, but I’d rather install it myself using a product such as this one thrown together by Pystar.
do you know what the term “script kiddie” means?
Thom,
which atom board do you have? I tried Rebel EFI with my D945GCLF and it errors out with a please restart your pc error for snow leopard.
OK people. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it! That’s the easiest, swiftest and cheapest way to get your message thru to Pystar.
That is not the point at all… thanks for the red herring though.
It has nothing to do with the people wanting or not their product, but the fact that their product is based on other people’s work… developers from whom they (pisstar) did not obtain any sort of permission. To top it all off, Pisstar is not complying with the licenses and the terms under which the codes they are ripping off were released.
In other words, these idiots are not only ripping off unsuspecting customers, they are actually ripping off the people that developed most of their product to begin with.
Again, this has nothing to do with personal choices regarding the purchasing of a product, it has a heck of a lot to do with completely and utterly unethical business practices.
Frankly I can’t wait until Apple legal puts the final smack down on these fools.
Edited 2009-10-28 23:06 UTC
The question is: do you dislike Psystar as company? Or is it that you think everyone installing OSX should be prosecuted too?
All the Mac enthusiasts are enormously hostile to Psystar, but one suspects they are actually hostile to anyone installing OSX on a non Mac.
Which is it?
Of course Maclots are hostile to all Hackintosh uers, and most of that hostility can be racked up to bitterness. They had to go through intense mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they weren’t being massively ripped-off by paying Apple’s exorbitant prices – then they see people getting the exact same thing, but for a fraction of the cost. Unacceptable!
So out come the standard vague, pseudo-intellectual bits of Apple fanboy rhetoric about “elegance” and the “Mac experience.” And that’s mixed in with some new intellectually-desperate generalizations about how all Psystar/Hackintosh supporters are thieves/pirates, or jealous of Apple, or hate Apple, or they’re cheapskates with no taste, etc.
Anything to make it seem like the Psystar/Hackintosh PCs aren’t actually a good deal (because they believe that would make Apple’s prices justified, by extension). Apparently Maclots don’t even have a problem mocking people for being poor, if they state cost as a reason for not buying a Mac.
What do you mean “ripping off the people that developed most of their product”? The folks who developed the product gave away the code for free. It’s impossible to “rip them off”, unless you mean they aren’t getting the benefit of Psystar’s improvements.
Where is Drunken Batman?
He was all over the CherryOS thing, why isn’t he first to the e-ink with this thing?
–bornagainpenguin