[OT] - Downloadable Mac OS

[Eric Dunbar]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:00:49 -0400, Rick Thomas <rbthomas55 at pobox.com> wrote:

> The reason no PowerPC Linux distro provides such a CD is that the
> drivers are Apple proprietary code.  The commercial houses that sell
> bootable CDs all (presumably) pay Apple for a license.
> 
> I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that if I owned a legally licensed
> copy of a MacOS9 install CD, I could -- for my own private use within
> the privacy of my own home -- legally copy the relevant driver
> partitions off of it to make an OldWorld bootable Linux CD-ROM.  I
> think it would be a fun experiment, but I haven't tried it.

I'm no lawyer either... However, I suspect that that using the drivers
without installing the OS would be a violation of the licence (I'm not
about to read through the licence to confirm it ;-). Normally you're
only allowed to do a certain amount with software that you get to
install and I imagine you're not allowed to do anything with the
driver.

But, as for practicalities, I don't imagine Apple would do anything to
you if you had copies of the CDs on hand (and, didn't distribute it).
Also, there may be CD drivers (that could boot a G3 SCSI or IDE) in
the 7.5.5 install that you could use. You wouldn't be able to
distribute them, but you probably could make your own for personal
use.

ERic.