CherryOS

» see cherryos.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

CherryOS was a PowerPC G4 emulator for Windows, announced on 12 October 2004 by Maui X-Stream, a Lahaina company best known until then for video streaming software. The pitch was the one every PC owner with Mac envy wanted to hear: install this on Windows 2000 or XP, and run Mac OS X applications at around eighty percent of your machine's native speed. Pre-orders opened the same day.

Three days in, the website fell over under what the company said was 300,000 hits a day, and by 19 October it was offline entirely while they moved hosts. Company president Jim Kartes credited the outage partly to traffic and partly to Mac purists attacking the servers. Lead developer Arben Kryeziu told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that nobody else's code was in there: "our lawyers have looked at this and say we're in the clear. We wrote this from scratch and we're clean as a whistle."

The number that made people suspicious was the speed. PearPC, the open source PowerPC emulator that had existed for a year already, was famously slow, and an eightfold improvement on it from a small Hawaiian outfit meant a serious piece of engineering, if the number was real. Wired reviewed a pre-release build on 22 October and reported two things at once: it ran exactly as slowly as PearPC, and an expert had found distinguishing watermarks from PearPC's source inside it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the watermark ~

Maui X-Stream's answer was that the build Wired tested was a "very bad...premature version" which "is not CherryOS", and that one of their programmers had already been fired for grafting PearPC code into it. Kryeziu allowed that PearPC had been the inspiration, "not the work, not the architecture. With their architecture I'd never get the speed." Some resemblance, he argued, was unavoidable between two programs doing the same job.

That explanation had to survive the 1.0 release on 8 March 2005, and it did not. BetaNews went through the shipped executable and found specific non-generic lines again, and PearPC contributors reported finding their own debug messages, from patches they personally had written, sitting inside the CherryOS binary. A spokesperson told the Irish Times on 24 March that the product was "absolutely not" a knockoff, because certain code strings and screen text "are not proprietary to the Pear PC product".

~ the week it unraveled ~

Version 1.0 had shipped as a free evaluation good for fourteen boots or five days, and Kartes said 100,000 people downloaded it almost immediately. On 30 March 2005 Ars Technica reported that the PearPC developers were contemplating litigation. On 6 April CherryOS was announced to be on hold until further notice. On 7 April the website said it would no longer be a commercial product at all, and that "due to overwhelming demand, Cherry open source project launches May 1, 2005".

Nobody was demanding that. It was the cheapest available exit from a GPL argument, and the open source release was never the thing anyone wanted from CherryOS anyway. The United States trademark, filed a week after the original announcement, was recorded as abandoned on 21 June 2006. The money PearPC's developers had collected for a lawsuit was donated to the Software Freedom Law Center instead.

~ the mac you could not buy ~

In 2005 I was at university in Turkey, where a Mac was something you saw in a magazine rather than on a desk. That is exactly the market CherryOS was aimed at, people who wanted the other operating system without the hardware, and it is why the story travelled as far as it did. cherryos.com today is a parking page selling the domain, with German ad copy on it about emulators.

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