Posted on 10/29/2003 2:11:13 PM PST by antiRepublicrat
I'm serious.
That is likely their own invention covered by their own patents (board technology) and copyrights (the BIOS). They have a right to license their patents, or not. We've seen what a disaster it was to the company to license, so their business decision was to stop.
It's quite different from the Lexmark case. A similarity would be if Apple designed their system to only write DVDs bought from them because of a part of their system that recognized only blank Apple DVDs. This decision says that such an action can be legally circumvented.
I think one of the funniest examples of abuse was the Agfa incident. True Type fonts have a bit in them that programs honor in whether to embed that font in a file or not. A font designer found that his designing application was always setting the bit to "don't embed" which he didn't want, so he wrote a program that quickly sets the bits on fonts to allow embedding.
Then he got a cease and desist order from Agfa (which sells fonts, mostly with the bit set to "do not embed") for distributing his program. The considered the bit to be copyright protection, and the program to be a circumvention device. Several letters later, with this smart guy knowing the law, they seem to have stopped harrassing him. But they had seemed to stop once before. All they need to do is take this case to court to ruin the guy financially.
Try installing a DVD/RW drive into a G4 that wasn't bought from Apple. Their software will not run on it.
I disagree with you on the patent and BIOS issues. There is no reason that another company cannot make replacement boards with different chipsets...look at PCs. Apple cuts them off at the legs every time it happens. Do you remeber the clone processor producer that was taken to court by Apple...and what about the teenager? who was making apple clones. He ended up in court too.
Apple has some issues and they aren't patent or BIOS issues. They don't want to let anyone, except who they choose, develop for the Mac.
IIRC, there are some reverse-engineers for that. Apple has always been litigation happy. But for board designs, the PC revolution started when Compaq reverse-engineered the PC chipset. Since then, there's been a general culture of interoperability and open standards, although Intel was suing people over P4 motherboard clones.
A lot of work goes into inventing these systems, and it is a reasonable thing to not let people copy your work without royalties, or not copy at all. Lexmark didn't invent anything that had been copied, just someone figured out out to fake authentication with the printer and they didn't like that.
Apple has some issues and they aren't patent or BIOS issues. They don't want to let anyone, except who they choose, develop for the Mac.
Because they don't want the fragmented "plug and pray" that you get in the PC world. Losing control over Mac components would seriously degrade the quality inherent in a Mac system. If you don't like it, you can just vote with your pocketbook and not buy Mac. You can, of course, do anything you want externally with Firewire and USB.
And I say all this being generally a build-it-yourself PC person. I just understand the Mac point.
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