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Speculative question: Are open source licenses legal in the EU, or are they also illegal? Seems to me that if one is illegal, all must be. (Go ahead, mod me down, but I can't find anything on Google supporting or refuting this, so have to ask. And please cite sources).

Apples and oranges, as it were. EULA's generally attempt to control how software is used, wheras OSS licenses generally attempt to control how software is distributed only and assert no control over how an individual uses it.

OSS licenses rely on the power of existing copyright law, which already deals with distribution, and at the very least the GPL, for one, has been found legally valid within the EU.

The problem with EULA's is two-fold: In many cases they are trying to enforce restrictions against privileges users may already have by law within their jurisdiction (ie. the ability to reverse-engineer, fair-use provisions for copying media, etc.) which would generally invalidate those provisions, and the second problem is the question of enforcing click-through or break-the-seal as a valid form of contractual agreement.

So EULA's are not necessarily illegal per se, but often the provisions they try to enforce or the manner in which users are forced to accept the terms, are.

You're pretty much dead on. What many people keep missing is that distribution licenses like the GPL don't really need to be "tested in court", in contrast to user licenses.

If you distribute GPL software without complying to its terms, the authors simply sues you for copyright violation. The GPL doesn't even come into play. Unless you as the violator invoke it, in which case you're left to argue that somehow the GPL gives you distribution rights even if you don't agree to its terms.

i wonder how that works with GPL3 and its new "use" related clauses...

What happens to an EULA once software becomes obsolete, for example, Windows 98. Is the EULA just rescinded and people can just do whatever they like with the software?

Why should we mod you down? I think it is a good question.

I guess I can answer that to some degree.
The GPL and other open source "licenses" can be interpreted in terms of copyright. You have the copyright of a product and allow others to reproduce it under certain rules. That is perfectly legal in terms of copyright. You are not restricted in using the software, though.

EULAs generally restrict you in using the software you bought. They try to be some kind of contract. And such kinds of "contracts" are void here.

Yet you don't need contracts to have your copyright. You only need to create/publish (depending on national law) something.

Please correct me if I was wrong.

You'd be surprised how many buttons are pushed with my question. Many people, especially on forums such as OSNews and Slashdot, like to spout things with no support, and mod people down who ask for proof.



Can you point me to a reading that states this? Many people make such claims, but fail to support them, so I would like some proof. Online legislation postings would be great. Too bad Google doesn't have "concept search".

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but it does give you a very good "plain english" explanation of the MS EULA vs. the GPL:

http://www.cybersource.com.au/about/comparing_the_gpl_to_eula.pdf

Well I could give you the link to the German wikipedia on EULAs, that sums it up nicely, but I doubt most people here understand German, neither will they understand Austrian law --> I could provide you with some paragraphs on contracts.
Even if you'd say an EULA is a contract some of the parts would still be void, as there are some kind of rules what is feasible in an AGB (Standard form contract), I could also provide you with paragraphs on that.

So if one is interested in the actual paragraphs I could provide you with these, at least the paragraphs I know of.

actually READ an EULA versus the GPL.. sometime .. then compare those rights with what you get when you purchase a CD or buy a book. Technically there is no need for an EULA, what's copyrighted is the "recording" of the software to the shiny disk, much like a CD is the recording of a copyrighted song played. The idea of copying to your computer shoudl be "fair use" just like playing a CD in a computational/player device. So the work is protected under normal provisions of the law. EULAs attempt to tell you that you can't read certian parts of the code, how many networks you can connect to, etc... Imagine attaching the same "EULA" to the patent on a table saw, or hammer, etc .. it would be silly!

You are correct.

An EULA and a copyright license are two very different things. The first one governs how a work may be used, the latter governs how it may be copied. Copyright licenses have a very established legal foundation. EULAs have no such thing.

Lots of correct answers have already been made and I don't want to repeat them. I want just add a video of a speech held by law professor Eben Moglen held in Harvard. It's very interesting if you are interested in this topic.
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=6345039926759549406

An EULA is not a license, but a License Agreement. The GPL is not a license agreement, but merely a License. There's a catch here. Besides that the GPL does not restrict usage in anyway. It only kicks in when distributing.

The Apple EULA (and the MS ditto) is not illegal as such, but it is none the less mostly void in most european countries, since it restricts rights that cannot be restricted according to law. Not even voluntarily.

Even if that were the case, the DMCA is most certainly legal and it has stood up in court, as is the case here. Besides, Apple would be complete idiots to allow OS X on other platforms and damage their hardware sales in the process.

Correction: the legality of the DMCA as a whole is not known. No DMCA case has ever gone before a court - all have been settled out of court. A lot of people, included the MPAA, have indicated that they have their doubts about it's constitutionality; but so long as it never goes to court, it's an effective tool for those that invoke it.

Even if it did go to court, it'd most likely take years, maybe even decades to sort out the mess. and gods help whoever gets stuck footing the legal bills

Commercial vendors and professional use of virtualized osx will never move forward unless it is santtioned.

Look what they did to the thinksecret.com guy. They closed down his website and he was just spreading rumors.

a Hackintosh vs a natural install. The first is fine for the hobbiest at home but the later opens osX up to non-geekdom and developer/business uses where using a hack to get it working would not be acceptable.

I love's me a good clean hack but I can see the advantage in an official release with the hardware DRM removed.

Eulas very commonly are lawful. There is nothing in EU law that makes them unenforceable. It depends on the provisions they contain.

There are two or three things they cannot do, not because they are Eulas, but because no contract which is a condition of sale which tries to do that will be lawful in the EU. Not even if you personally read and sign it before you open the package.

The first thing is, no post sales restrictions on use of a purchased product will be valid. Once you have bought it, you can do what you like with it, within the laws of the land. So, Apple does not have to sell copies of OSX by itself. But having done so, it cannot tell you what to run it on. And it cannot get around this by pretending that though you have walked out the shop with a CD and no further payment obligations, you have in fact leased or licensed it and not bought it. It is a purchase. The reason for this is very simple: if a car manufacturer could impose post sales restrictions on use, it would, and would force you to buy parts only from it. If a tool supplier could do it, it could make you buy the pro versions before you could legally use them in way of trade. Etc.

This is one thing. The second thing is it cannot force you to lower your statutory rights under consumer protection and trade law in consideration of selling to you. So whatever your rights are about warranty, return and so on, you still have them, no matter what the Eula or any other agreement says.

The conclusion of this is very simple. If OSX really does run unmodified under KQEMU, there is nothing Apple can do to stop anyone running a purchased copy of it that way. Nothing.

The same thing applies to running MS Office under Wine. It makes no difference what any purchase agreement says, MS cannot stop you running one lawfully purchased copy of Office under Wine. Or any other emulator.

As the last example shows, before getting too enthusiastically convinced that Apple should be able to stop you running OSX on any other hardware, think about the implications a bit. To do it, you'd have to give similar rights to all sorts of other people for whom you might feel rather less enthusiasm....

I dont know if you know it (i aso dont know if i can say it here, delete my post if i cant) but Mac OSX actually run on non-apple hardware, and driver status is not that bad. Driver ARE prted from FreeBSD and Linux (rewritten based on old code). OSX work very well on PC. Personally, i own a mac book pro so i dont have to use it (i dont even use mac os at all, i am a linux user). More than that: apple dont used osx86 project back in 2005. Back at the time, they did nothing (almost) to break the patch (they did from 10.4.1 to 10.4.2, but it was a major rewrite of some part). They almost allowed us to do it, because some people did port application to universal binary before comercial product, and found problems and bugs that were corected. Before the first x86 mac, it was almost fine for apple to see hackintosh.

After that, things did change, but not tthat much. When x86 goes out, apple did start to send legal letter to website and did close the most illegal one. After 2 month or so, they stoped again. Since that, they did not try to break the patch and osx86 still work with the two years old anti-tmp-kernel patch. Many drivers have been writen for product. Many open darwin driver have been hacked and improved and many project have been made. Apple dont seem to want to stop this, but i dont really know why anymore, probably for advertising, i dont thing nobody that use osx86 full time will buy a PC again, it is the most plausible explanation...

I think you missed most of what I said: I said nothing about Mac OS X running on non-Apple hardware, I wrote only of driver porting. I cannot find through Google any mention of drivers being ported from FreeBSD. A driver "port" would equate to a >50% (roughly) rewrite, as shimming the FreeBSD code into the C++ IOKit framework is a large undertaking, and can only seriously be done by either a complete rewrite, or a very large rewrite.

Wow what an eye opener shopping for new ram too stuff in my wife's macbook was. A gig of ram at the Apple Store; 300$. A gig of ram at a third party retailer; 100$'ish.

If secondhand isn't your thing, you may be able to skip ebay and craig's list and find competitive pricing from a third party Apple retailer instead. The Apple Store is where they make there money; factory outlet, it ain't.

You'll notice that some things are clearly priced so that you'll shop elsewhere, if you know to, and others priced so that you buy from them. RAM upgrades are a good example at 2x the cost of a discounter, but Apple's 1.8" 64G SSD drive costs 2/3 as much the closest competitor's product at New Egg.

Booo.. them.

I've never been able to fully support the "what the market will support" method of markups. Mind you, I always see these things from the customer side so I find a standard markup percentage too be fair rather than the first method mentioned.

I'll keep your tip in mind though next time I have to upgrade parts in one of the two osX boxes at home. I'm not faithful to the brand name so which ever retailer can give me the parts for the most reasonable price wins my business on a buy by buy basis.

If we paid a standard markup, we would pay a hell of alot more for consumer electronics.

we would also be the most half assed communists ever

Fine link. All you really need to know.

Indeed, this article is worth a read.

For one, the problem is that there are people who will still go and cry at Apple because something doesn't work and when Apple tells them to scram the Intertubes will explode with people calling Apple names and generally bitching about it (see the "calamity" around the first iPhone update and the bricked de-AT&T-ed handsets).

Of course there is also the small matter of lost revenue for Apple, due to diminishing Mac sales and selling Mac OS X for $130 instead of however Apple makes from it right now.

All in all, fun times for Apple and insane benefit for their clients.

Why can't Apple just say "if you run OS X via virtualization, or a hack, you're on your own; without a valid Macintosh serial number we won't reply to your question."

End of story.

But this isn't the scenario that Apple wants. It would be the worst thing for their mindshare (not to mention their hardware sales), as people would start buying these cheaper machines.Then there would be this growing cloud of frustration as people find software failing left and right on their shiny new unsupported Mac.

Maybe professionals can deal with internals specifications like motherboards, sound cards, graphics processors, but the average consumer is not going to bother with that. To most people, computers are just black boxes with a number that tells you how fast it is and how much music you can store on it.

In the end, the only way Apple can provide such an integrated package is to keep it closed and under control. It's nice when you don't have to worry about device drivers and compatibility.

For example, OS X has no trouble doing all of the visual GUI magic that it does on my Macbook, yet under Ubuntu, GXL/AIGLX still craps itself when I try to bring up a simple GLUT program. This is not because it's a faulty piece of software, it's because there isn't (or wasn't) a team of people responsible for making sure it could work with my GMA950.

In the end Apple's vertical solution makes it so you can spend less time getting your machine to work, and more time doing work with your machine.

Agreed. I have plenty of PC hardware already, much more than I need or use on a daily basis. I would like to experience Mac OS both for fun and as a software professional but I can't justify buying even more hardware just to experience some piece of software that won't run on my existing hardware due to some contrived and artificial limitation.

Its not a matter of apple not wanting to spend the resources on supporting other hardware (though that does play some part obveously). Its mostly a matter of apple wanting to overcharge for hardware. Think about it. If suddenly you were aloud to run osx anywhere, then suddenly they have to compete with cheaper 3rd party hardware. People aren't going to pay 2x as much for mac hardware when they can get the same thing at, for example, dell. OSX sales would increase, but their pc hardware sales would all but vanish.

They are no better or worse than every company in existence though. They just want to make as much money as they can in whatever sleazy quasi legal/moral/ethical way they can. They don't care about the customer any farther than "are people stupid enough to buy this?". And if they aren't stupid enough to buy it, then its "Is there a cheap enough way to force people to buy it?". Of course, in both cases, in the software industry, and starting to appear in hardware there is "How can we get them to buy it again, without getting it again?"

Edited 2008-01-25 19:54 UTC

You really don't get it. In the world of business, Apple is ranked on their gross revenue. In other words, the total cash they take in. So, by being a COMPUTER company that happens to sell a computer with an OS they and OSS wrote on it, They take in boatloads more than $120 per copy of each Leopard install disk. If they were to sell Leo to run on any hardware even with a Caveat Emptor (buyer beware) AND turn down any support calls without a valid serial number or other means to prevent supporting your hackintosh, they would still be walking down the EXACT same path they did when they licensed the OS to third party manufacturers. Their computer sales go down and pittance of money for a Leo disk compared to computer sales will cause their gross margins to plummet even if thousands and thousands of geeks go out and purchase a copy of hackLeo. Selling a copy of Leo at any price to people who don't own (and wouldn't eventually replace) a Mac would be jeopardizing their financial standing.

(Trivial to that, by setting up a separate channel of Hackintosh computers also dilutes the user experience to potential buyers. If you're okay with a few problems but show off your Hackintosh, what's that person to think when it does something outside of the normal experience? Say it's exactly fine to the point of not even showing a BIOS screen (which Macs do NOT have), what happens when that (less skilled) person wants a Hackintosh and somehow manages to build it? Does he know who to blame when things go wrong? Could be the hack. Could be Apple. What's the perception when more and more people build a Hackintosh? That Macs are no better than anything else out there. Sales therefore decline that way as well.)

I want Apple to continue to turn out insanely great stuff, not be faced with the challenges that a Hackintosh creates.

Pecos Bill
I don't work for Apple nor own shares of Apple.

The Mac cloners also produced machines that had better specs then the Macs produced by Apple at the time. Less money plus more performance is generally a winning combination.

iTunes should recognize other mp3 players, at least on OS X. It's annoying that it doesn't, and since it's bundled, it killed off the other OS X media players.

Maybe I have permanent brain damage from FOSS and Windows, but I would think that Apple would license FairPlay to other mp3 players and collect licensing fees, and I would also think that Apple would want to make iTunes as ubiquitous as possible. More FairPlay capable players and more installations of iTunes would increase sales for the iTunes music store.

Apple makes most of their profit from the iPod hardware itself: the music store exists as the loss leader (or at least not for the profit itself in a meaningful way) to enhance the value of the iPod, all in line with the TUE business model.

Again, back to the OS X question: even if other vendors made OS X-capable machines, it could seriously dilute the image Apple tries to market, that of some degree of exclusivity, as well as the TUE: even if the machines that are sold are of lesser components and quality, chances are, in order to grab the market, the competitors will accept a much lower profit per machine in order to sell it: Apple still doesn't win, because, once again, their model is that the software/content sells the hardware, and that's where they get the most profits from.

Oh, edited to add this: iTunes doesn't at all keep you from using other players, and it still allows you to download songs (albeit non-FairPlay protected ones) for use on other players, though I'm not aware of it synching to other players (that can be done with other software) so Apple still provides some support for selling songs otherwise, but... the overall TUE is by far going to be best with their hardware.

Edited 2008-01-25 18:24 UTC

Exactly, Total User Experience.

Apple is the only one doing it, wich is why they seem so slick & everybody wants one (even you haters secretly drool).

hell thats why this is a story.

And your asking them to give that up?

Please.

Personally it think Linux needs a company that limts the hardware support to provide a TUE. rather than oh most of my laptop works but no wifi, modem or acpi.

You're right it would be a really big boon to technicians who have to support a few Macs, they might even be remote. Fire up a VM and troubleshoot rather then buy a piece of hardware that only gets used occasionally, or fire up a VM and trash that install rather then a working one.