xeron wrote:
Magic-Merl wrote:
So to simplyfy things - no Apple do not suffer because OSX appears on P2P networks.
Thats not quite true...
OS X ain't Free or free, no. Apple's business model, however, does let them happily 'charge twice,' as they can make profit on both the hardware and software upgrades. This is a good spot to be in, if you can pull it off, and they of course rely on it, while the coziness of the situation does seem to let them turn the same blind eye Microsoft used to turn to piracy for now.*
The disingenious thing is that the hype around Darwin has many people 'honestly' thinking the software is free to share or trade, and the expensive shrinkwrapped versions are just a 'distribution' a-la RHAT. (I get this mostly from people who don't actually own Macs, and they're the same ones confused into thinking Darwin will actually give you Aqua on a PC. It's not a big deal now, but as x86 gets fast enough to make PearPC sort of livable, expect to hear more about it.)
*The somewhat weak thing is that this leaves users obliged to pay the 'OS tax' when they bought in thinking the Mac makes life easier. This wasn't a big deal Back In The Day, when computers were new, but it's getting a bit iffy now; don't forget, Apple -point releases- tended towards being free bugfixing upgrades, but 10 has seen people have to run the treadmill up about 3 paid purchases for the system to get stable enough to use. Still, it's fairly stable around 10.3 (or 10.2, even), so those versions might linger around as long as it's easy enough to backport to them. (My opinion is that Apple has some timebombs -- more like "design decisions" -- lurking in the basic architecture to ensure, say, 10.3 will be too annoying to target after two or three point releases up.)
Meanwhile, this 'charging twice' is absolutely nothing compared to what Microsoft does with site licensing; at least Apple is 'charging twice' by selling fixes and new APIs (despite advertising that, of course, the system is stable and you'll never need fixes or constant upgrades like those poor Windows users), while MS make a lot of money convincing OEMs to preload (adding the Windows tax to the hardware), then convincing organizations to take site licenses for all those machines with paid copies to avoid the long and painful ream of a BSA audit.
