Re: [Qemu-devel] Mac OS X at native speed...

[Ryan Rempel]

On 6/9/05, Hetz Ben Hamo <address@hidden> wrote:

> XpostFacto let you install OS X on macs with PPC chips (G3 as
> minimum), not on Intel based PC's.
> 
> Apple will *not* let users install OS-X/ X86 on your PC. Thats the
> official word from Phil Schiller, Vice president of worldwide
> marketting at Apple.
> 
> So, I'm pretty sure Apple will use some tricks to not-allow users to
> install OS-X/X86 on non-apple  X86 based machines by using some tricks
> (different BIOS, additional ROM, or some heavy modifications to some
> chipset).

It will be interesting to see what Apple does to prevent Mac OS X /
Intel from running on generic hardware. At the moment, there isn't
anything special in Mac OS X / PPC that prevents it from running on
generic PPC hardware -- of course, there are a variety of technical
issues to deal with, but there isn't anything either at the Darwin
layer or the GUI layer that actively prevents people from getting it
to work on generic PPC hardware. (Well, the Mac OS X Installer in 10.3
and 10.4 does decline to install on certain known systems that were
supported by previous versions of Mac OS X, but it will install on
unknown systems).

However, the Mac OS X license does restrict the user to installing on
Apple hardware. I haven't given much thought to how enforceable that
restriction would be. The license for the "developer preview" of Mac
OS X / Intel is currently even more restrictive -- it prevents the
developer from installing Mac OS X / Intel on any other machine than
the one which Apple supplies (on which Mac OS X / Intel is
pre-installed).

The interesting thing about the technical tricks that Apple might use
to "lock out" non-Apple hardware is that most of those tricks will
have to trust the kernel, and the Mac OS X kernel is heavily
modifiable in one way or another (kernel extensions, patching,
recompiling, etc.). Perhaps there could be some kind of
motherboard-based DRM, but even that would need to be accessed through
the kernel, one presumes.

Perhaps some moderate technical difficulties combined with licensing
prohibitions would be sufficient for Apple's purposes -- it will be
interesting to see what they come up with.