Jared is busy

Psystar gets slapped, hard

Psystar has lost their case against Apple. You can read the summary here from BusinessWeek, and all the gory details here from Groklaw.

Frankly, I’m fine with the decision, particularly after the story published by SF Weekly which fawned all over the founders of Psystar for six pages, painting them as revolutionaries fighting an evil empire. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.

As a software developer, I believe strongly in license agreements whether they are applied to commercial or open source software. Computing is a unique industry from a legal and liability standpoint, and companies and individual developers alike have the right to protect themselves and their work.

As a hacker, I’m all in favor of making a piece of software or a system do something it’s not intended to do by the creator. I applaud Psystar’s founders and their hacker ethic, but I believe they were foolish and arrogant to try and make a business out of breaking the law and acting like Apple is the one in the wrong.

The bottom line is, if you don’t like the EULA, don’t use the product. The great thing about the computing industry and the advent of open source/free software is that we have choice.

Full disclosure: I’m an AAPL shareholder. A minor one, but a shareholder nonetheless.