is it not illegal to run os x on a pc

imduffy, as I stated, I don’t want a Hackintosh, I want Apple to release OS X for anyone to buy.

Have a good day.

While it may or may not be “illegal” to run OS X on any other platform than an Apple, it is certainly a violation of an OS X owner’s EULA to do so.

Whether EULAs themselves are “legal” or not is also up in the air.
Many judiciaries have great problems with so-called “shrink-wrap” licenses

Please, read your Apple warranty.

It is, however, perfectly legal to run Windows (or any other non-Apple OS) as the exclusive OS on your Intel-based Apple. No mention is made of this in the OS X EULA.

So I suggest that if you really want to screw around with Apple, remove OS X entirely (including the EFI partition) from your Apple Intel PC, and install Vista in its place.

It is really very simple. If you want do this, let me know. I will send you an extremely easy method for doing it. It requires no hacks to Windows or OS X, so neither License Agreement will be broken.

And while Apple certainly doesn’t want you to install Windows (or any other OS) in any other ways than dual-booting using Boot Camp Assistant or using a virtual machine, they do absolutely nothing to keep you from doing it an alternate way.

And Microsoft doesn’t really care what platform you use. All they care is that you purchase a license from them rather than some bootlegger.

So neither Apple nor Microsoft will be “hurt” financially. Maybe Apple will take a hit to its huge ego, but that’s about all.

All-in-all, it’s pretty much a “win-win” situation all around.

Donald McDaniel
orthocross@gmail.com

Donald, did you read what I wrote? Any of it? 1] I never said I want to run OS X illegally, by anyone’s definition. 2] I do want Apple to release it for non- Apple hardware 3] Why would anyone in their right mind run only Windows on Apple hardware?

The elegance, charm, and power of Apple is in the software, not in the hardware.

Have a nice day.

“Now for many, *Apple* or Windows may suffice.”
There, fixed that for you.

Why use OS X when I can run the original, the powerful FreeBSD 7? Or slackware, for that matter? being infinitely customizable through open-source i can make it do whatever i want! And I can run it any any hardware I want: my Mac, my PC, my iPod, my Toaster (no I’m not kidding here), my PS3, my XBOX, even my old dreamcast console (remember those?). And it’s free, and I don’t have to worry about getting sued for simply running it on “non-holy” hardware. Linux/BSD (the F/OSS versions) are more powerful than OS X will ever be, simply because of the ideology backing it. Sure, there’s Darwin, but there’s no point in using it. It’s just a ripped off version of FreeBSD.

/rant

Oracle,

The reason that Apple won’t do an OS X for everyone is because that’s been done before, and it didn’t work out very well.

BeOS did that; as a spinoff from Apple, they built an interesting hardware platform with a stellar OS atop it. They sold both, profited, and, in their hubris, thought they could take on Windows on even footing. So, they sold BeOS for the i386 PC market and died at the hands of MSFT’s OEM agreements and cheapskates. End users saw no need to buy the expensive Be hardware when they could get “the same thing” from a commodity junk PC. Be couldn’t stay solvent without the sales of their hardware to prop up the software R&D.

NeXT did that; as a spinoff from Apple, they built an amazing hardware platform with an interesting OS atop it. They sold it, profited, and, in their hubris, thought they could take on Windows and Solaris and HP-UX on even footing. So, they sold NeXTstep for the i386 PC and SPARC and HPPA workstations markets, and were stomped by MSFT’s OEM agreements, a lack of applications, and the headache of supporting four architectures. End users saw no need to buy the expensive NeXT hardware when they could get “the same thing” from a commodity junk PC, and technical users saw no need to throw out the expensive software that came with their expensive RISC workstations. NeXT couldn’t stay solvent without the sales of their hardware to prop up the software R&D.

Let me reiterate that: You could -buy- OS X (back when it was called NeXTstep / OpenStep) for your whitebox PC ten years ago, and it -killed- the company that made it.

Apple made moves to buy both of those companies in their death throes. They picked NeXT. So, now we have NeXTstep with a thicker POSIX wrapper around it and FreeBSD’s userland utilities, but the same guy at the helm. That guy, Steve Jobs, has Been There and Done That and knows that if he, in his hubris, thinks that OS X can compete on even footing with Windows in the face of MSFT’s OEM agreements and millions of companies with their hundreds of millions of seats of nothing-but-Windows because that’s the “corporate standard”, the following will happen:

1) OS X will make insufficient inroads to be a solid competitor to Windows on the commodity junk PC market.
2) People who want to run OS X will see no reason to buy the expensive hardware when they can get -exactly- the same thing on a commodity junk PC; because that what Apple sells.
3) Apple, as a computer company, won’t stay solvent without the sales of their hardware to prop up the software R&D.

A similar story happened to OS/2 in the mid-90s. Killed by OEM agreements (even IBM couldn’t make OS/2 the default OS on their own hardware in many market segments), and a falling-out with Microsoft (no WIn32 support for Win-OS/2), Microsoft told IBM where they could cram their also-ran OS.

OS X is as great as it is today because Microsoft can’t stomp it into the dirt, because Microsoft’s dirty marketing tricks don’t fly on Apple hardware. This has given a “safe haven” for OS X, where Apple can collect premiums on the hardware to fund the development of the platform as a whole, and they can take full retail price for the OS, rather than $30/head OEM agreements. Due to Microsoft’s market presence, Apple -has- to have a more expensive OS just to keep pace; they don’t have guaranteed sales to, for example, every machine Dell sells. Taking the hardware premium out of that equation means either the OS has to have a sticker price so high that no one will want it or that OS X will not survive because everyone will want to run it on their cheap new Dell box.

Oh, and SmurfsINC: It’s a bit hard for Darwin to be a ripped-off version of FreeBSD, given that the first developer previews of NeXTstep were pressed five years before the FreeBSD project was started. Yes, modern OS X has most of its userland tools from FreeBSD, but the internals are vastly different (even if in mostly-annoying ways).

Jonathan, Thanks for your comments, I happen to disagree, but let’s see how.

1] Be was interesting, but did hardly anything really well, other than graphics arts stuff. The software never came to support the OS. The hardware was ahead of its time, and did cost, but I believe it could have survived if the applications had come. It was a cool toy, not much more, except for the graphics person - who could do much the same with a PC using Adobe products.

2] Having seen Next, I see it as OS X is right now, if no other software was available. (For the average person) it was almost completely void of 3rd party stuff that would bring users onboard - same as Be. It was too ‘workstation’ for Joe Average. It was designed for the guy who compiles his own.

3] Apple could make inroads now, as it has diversified - iPod, iPhone, and whatever comes will allow work on the OS. The thing we would have to accept is limited hardware compatibility. If sold with the idea that your system did not fit 100% into the HCL you had no support, the problems of chasing after ghosts in the machine would be gone.
Apple SHOULD realize that the magic is in its software - because a look into a Mac now shows nothing special - commodity parts of decent quality. It’s quality stuff on an Intel motherboard - nice, but not earth shaking. (This is where I believe Jobs really made a mistake if he was not going to sell OS X separately - Why not stay with Power? Have you seen what Power6 can do?

4] You’re right about OS/2, it should have won, it was always better than Windows. IBM should have ‘muscled’ OS/2 through, it lost the nerve to use its power and position. The cases I saw of failure was when idiots were trying to run it on inferior hardware - especially cheap memory that hardly met the speed grade it was given.

5] Not sure what you are referring to about MS dirty marketing tricks on the Apple hardware - as above it is standard Intel stuff.

6] I use Darwin to name the project, that after OS X had already appeared on the Mac, was open source to bring the OS X experience to i386. This was certainly after FreeBSD. The Mach kernel is different - the article I cited states that clearly, but the roots are a graft from the FreeBSD - BSD 4.4 Unix tree.

SmurfsINC, while I like FreeBSD as much or more than the next guy, I don’t see it as a replacement for everyone’s desktop just yet. It is stuck in ’server mode’ as far as look and feel goes. It is magnificent as a server but Joe Average won’t be jumping on board just yet.

Oracle,

1) BeOS did -everything- well. It had filesystem features that no one else had seen on a desktop. It had low-enough latency for realtime things, and was featureful enough to use as a desktop OS; you could literally take the same system running Linux or Windows and put BeOS on it and get roughly 2x throughput for anything that balanced I/O and CPU load (video encoding/decoding, for example) because of the design of the filesystem and I/O system. It didn’t die for lack of utility or software or ability. It died because Be couldn’t sell enough licenses to it to make up the lack of profit on the hardware sales. Even today, the books written on the internals of BeOS should be required reading for anyone doing operating systems development, right alongside those for Unix and VMS.

2) NeXTstep had a ton of software for it. It had a full suite of desktop publishing software, a fair amount of graphics editing software, and more scientific software than any other platform at the time. The web was born on NeXTstep. It wasn’t so much born for people who compiled their own stuff (most people didn’t even order the developer’s option). It was designed for a scientific/technical/academic setting. It was a workstation OS; not a desktop OS, back when that distinction meant something.

3) POWER6 is a very capable processor, and I’ve run a couple of IBM systems with POWER6 MCMs in them. That said, POWER6 is, by no means, a desktop processor. To scale them down (both thermally and in terms of instruction set optimisation) to something desktop-friendly would mean what the Apple/PPC relationship did the entire time: Apple gets previous-generation POWER technology (G5 was only POWER4), IBM has an expensive product to maintain with only one real customer, and that customer orders as-needed, not in bulk. If you speak to anyone at IBM Austin about the G5 delays, they’ll universally respond that it was due to Apple only placing small orders, since they didn’t have the finances or order months in advance. Retooling a fab for a different product is time-consuming (figure 3 - 4 weeks lead time at least) and expensive. It actually ended up costing Apple more to place small orders, but they simply didn’t have the capital to order what they’d need for 6 months to a year.

4) IBM had their hands tied. They sold PS/2s and Aptivas and Thinkstations to run Windows, and they didn’t want to see the costs on their Windows systems increase by more than $100. They actually shipped some with OS/2 installed, but you had to twiddle the active-partition bits in the MBR to see it; they’d boot Windows 3.1 by default.
Actually, in the case of IBM, I’d be surprised if Microsoft wouldn’t have yanked their OEM agreement entirely, forcing IBM to buy the software retail. There was a lot of bad blood over the OS2/WindowsNT fallout.
This exact sort of thing ended my business building PCs 9 years ago. I wanted to ship some systems with LInux installed, and MSFT told me I no-longer could purchase software as an OEM. There was a class-action suit against that, but it was getting hard enough to turn a profit as a small system builder, so I just gave it up.

5) What I mean by MS marketing tricks are OEM agreements. In order to get MS desktop software at OEM bulk pricing, you are prohibited from making other OSes available as the primary OS on that same hardware. In exchange, MS gets a license fee for each desktop system sold regardless of whether it ships with an OS or not. Given those agreements, a system from a major manufacturer with an OS costs the consumer the same as one without, so the consumer’s impression is that other OSes are “expensive” since Windows is effectively free. The OEM has no incentive to bundle some third-party OS and make it bootable, since most of their systems will still ship with Windows, and they’ll go from paying the bulk $30/seat license for everything they sell to paying the regular OEM fee of $150/seat for only the machines that run Windows. Since Apple categorically Does Not Ship Windows, they can put whatever they want on their hardware without the effective price going up.

6) Apple called the kernel “Darwin” long before it was open source (a uname on 10.0 will confirm this), and it ran on i386 since it was OpenStep; it just wasn’t released as source until later. Mach is not based on BSD 4.4 any more than Linux is based on System V. Mach was, explicitly, a replacement/alternate operating system on which to run the BSD userland.

Jonathan, I see we have different perceptions on this, and that yours is from being in a different place than I. I do see the points you make as valid, but not from the ‘everyman’ standpoint. (Not that I’ve ever been confused with an everyman type)
I now build and repair computers, but it is still from the perspective of an outsider - I don’t think of myself on anybody’s team, and what I take from your writing is that at some time you were on somebody’s team. When I build a computer, it is a one off for that user, because they know about my skills at matching up things for a particular purpose. Every customer of mine knows upfront that they can undercut my price, but that when help is needed, I’m much easier to reach than Dell tech support (or any other). I don’t make tons of money, but I do make lots of happy customers.
Thanks for the discussion, drop by any time.