Apple V. Psystar update

Looks like Psystar will soon be going out of business. Today, Judge William Alsup dismissed Psystar’s lawsuit claiming that Apple was unfairly being a monopoly by only allowing OS X to be installed on Apple machines and not allowing clones.

This decision will set a very interesting precedent with regards to having a company lock a piece of software to its own company’s hardware. This does a significant blow to forcing openness among the computing community and having interoperation between systems.

Some might claim that this decision, in the long run, will not do any significant damage since the trend is for having users put all of their information and do most of their computing tasks on the interwebs.

Pystar does have until December 18th to try and clean up their suit in order to attempt to convince the judge that their defense is legitimate.

I would have liked to have seen Pystar actually win the case, so that Apple would have to allow OS X on cloned machines, thus expanding Apple’s reach and providing yet more of a ‘halo’ effect. But, it is not to be.

I’m not a lawyer, so do not take my interpretation with anything less than a handful of salt. But it looks like the end of the road for Psystar. Guess we’ll all have to rely on the OSx86 project.

I'm into everything technology related, particularly anything Apple related. I enjoy programming and tend to lean towards server-based technologies over client-based. You can contact me on twitter, via e-mail, or follow me on friendfeed.