Psystar

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

~ the obituary ~

Apple stopped licensing the Macintosh in 1997. Power Computing was bought out and UMAX was cut off, and for eleven years afterwards the rule held without exception: Mac OS ran on Apple hardware and on nothing else that anybody would sell you. In april 2008 a company nobody had heard of announced it was breaking that rule for $399.

Psystar Corporation was Rudy and Robert Pedraza, operating out of Miami. The machine was called the OpenMac until Apple's trademark lawyers came up in conversation, at which point it became the Open Computer. Underneath it was an unremarkable PC, a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of memory and Intel integrated graphics, and the only interesting thing about it was the operating system Psystar would put on before it shipped. Units were going out by late april.

The operation behind that was less impressive than the announcement. Psystar bought a retail copy of Leopard and installed it on a Mac mini, then used a non-Apple staging machine to turn that installation into a master image. Every unit that left the building carried a copy of the image, and the same Mac mini sat there pulling down Apple's updates so they could be ported across. This was not a clean-room reimplementation of anything. It was one legally purchased copy, duplicated.

Inside the first week people were asking whether the company existed at all. It gave out five different addresses in four days, and somebody found malware on the website. It was also taking credit card numbers without processing them, because its payment processor had already pulled the account for misrepresenting the business and for volumes that came in far above what it had declared. The outfit about to fight Apple in federal court had not yet convinced anyone it could handle an order.

None of this reached me as a thing to buy, because it could not have: nobody in turkey was going to order a computer from Miami in order to get an operating system onto it. The hackintosh arrived everywhere else as a forum thread instead, a boot disc and a list of which motherboards worked, passed around for nothing and belonging to no company. That is exactly the difference the lawsuit turned on. Apple had spent years ignoring people doing this at home. Psystar put a price on it and printed invoices.

~ the case file ~

~ the open computer ~

The pitch was the price. $399 for a base configuration at a moment when Apple's cheapest desktop started at $599 and the tower most professionals actually wanted started well above $2,000. There was an OpenPro that ran past $1,100 fully specified. The line was ordinary PC parts at ordinary PC margins with one very expensive thing bundled in that Psystar was not entitled to bundle.

In october 2009 it went further and released Rebel EFI, a shareware bootloader that let anyone install Mac OS X on any PC without buying Psystar hardware at all. It was not Psystar's work. It was built on Apple's own open-source Boot-132 in violation of that license, and observers read it as a repackaged build of Chameleon from the OSx86 Project, whose developers had already said Psystar used their code without asking and had rewritten their license afterwards to forbid commercial use.

~ the argument they lost ~

Psystar's public line was a car analogy: what if Honda said that after you bought their car you could only drive it on roads they approved? The legal version was narrower and more interesting. Apple's license restricted installation to Apple-labeled hardware, and Psystar argued that using copyright to enforce a hardware requirement was copyright misuse.

The argument got one hearing that looked promising. In february 2009 Judge Alsup let a modified copyright misuse claim survive, and for a few months it seemed possible the Apple-only clause might not hold up. It did not survive the rest of the case. The DMCA claim was the one that mattered, because Psystar had to defeat Apple's copy protection to get the operating system booting on a non-Apple machine, and under that statute the defeating is the offense no matter what you think of the license behind it.

Discovery also produced the numbers, and they are the bleakest thing in the file. Psystar's investor deck had asked for $24 million on projections of 70,000 machines in 2009 under conservative assumptions and 12 million machines by 2011 under aggressive ones. An economist working for Apple went through the invoices and purchase orders and could document 768 sales with Mac OS X preinstalled. Psystar did not contest the analysis.

~ the postmortem ~

The bankruptcy came first. Psystar filed Chapter 11 in florida on 26 may 2009 and carried on selling machines with Leopard on them regardless. Apple argued the filing was a stalling tactic, the court lifted the stay in june, and by 12 august a Florida judge had dismissed the bankruptcy with prejudice, barring another Chapter 11 filing for twelve months and stripping any future filing of its power to pause the California case.

After that it moved fast. Apple won summary judgment on 13 november 2009 on the copyright claim and on the DMCA claim together, and by 1 december Psystar had agreed to a $2.7 million settlement with payment deferred until the appeals ran out. Judge Alsup signed the permanent injunction on 15 december. It barred Psystar from selling Mac OS X or from helping anybody else get around Apple's protection, and it ordered the equipment used for the circumvention destroyed by the end of the year. Psystar announced an appeal in january 2010, and by that august its website and its store were both unreachable.

~ the long tail ~

The Ninth Circuit affirmed on 28 september 2011. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on 14 may 2012, closing the file almost four years after the first Open Computer shipped. The $2.7 million became payable by a company that had never had it.

Something did survive, and it was not the hardware. Material Apple had designated as trade secret entered the public record in january 2012 as a consequence of the case, and the case itself became the standard citation for the proposition that a software license can restrict which hardware you run the software on. Every time somebody argues that buying a copy means owning it, this is the ruling that answers. Today psystar.com loads a parking lander.

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