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I greatly agree on the scope of this case, but not on the implementation of the logic. Non Free Non OSS SW determines how and where you get to install it. That seems to be the case with anything that has a receipt or serial number. Heck the prime reason that The Mac OS has not required a serial number was because for nearly the first twenty years the OS ran exclusively on Apple Branded HW ( with a brief extension into clones) Apple is the Hardware, and the MacOS is the Software. This is pretty easy. And I think we can all agree on those two points. Last month I saw someone on the train with a Vaio laptop running MacOS hacked, and running xp in VMware. Assuming that he bought his software he is in compliance not by the letter but by the intent of the law. Apple is not looking for him and his type - And I am assuming that he bought the SW. Undoubtably Sony Makes a MacOS compatible device. But that is not what they are trying to do. Sony is just doing the best that it can. Sony is a real company.

Apple is correct in trying to stop Psystar from making unlicensed clones. Because Apple did all of the hard work and all of the engineering and especially all of the marketing and as such they deserve all of the profits on their SW. Now if I decide to buy a Sony or build a Mac compatible unit myself then I deserve to run it but I do not have the right to re sell it as 'My product'. Apple the hardware side is not under any moral obligation to let Psystar ride their engineering. Apple took all of the risk and they deserve all of the profit. Where was Psystar during the PPC days or during the bad old days. If I took the Free Open Source SW quagga and told the world that it was as good as cisco well that could be true. But if I sold Quagga/Zebra software in the cisco router space then I would expect cisco to hire a well paid lawyer to sue me down to a smoking hole in the ground.

There is NOTHING in the MacOS that the F/OSS software movement cannot replicate with some effort. The MacOS is essentially yet another unix. It is not because of the tight integration between HW & SW it is because of the well written abstraction of the HW from the SW. If you are willing to take the steps to make your Debian or Suse or Fedora work as well as a Mac then bring it. Bring it and share it. At that point you might be willing to bundle it as your own distro.

So suppose that you make your very own 'Cortland' distro (a NY State variety of Apple) and it is successful. Some people buy CDs some people download your .ISOs people are writing you checks and grants - on the balance you luckily recoup most of your expenses. Next thing you know someone clones all of your work and calls it 'Empire' (another NY State variety of Apple)

Do you owe them anything because what you built was made from a reference spec? <PERSONALLY> I feel that Psystar should Man Up and make their own distro, Like Shuttleworth/ Ubuntu or write Linux SW that functions like the Mac desktop - iLife apps or whatever. The more that they cloud this with noise about the SW license the dumber it gets. Apple is NOT GNU or F/OSS and neither is Windows or Novell or Lotus or anything that comes shrink wrapped with a EULA

The implications are going to be far reaching