Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!lts!amanda
From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Jonathan (Macintosh Clone for somewhat more than $1000!)
Message-ID: <1095@lts.UUCP>
Date: 28 Mar 89 17:26:55 GMT
References: <530@umiami.miami.edu> <7423@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Reston, VA
Lines: 51

In article <7423@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>,
	caromero@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (C. Antonio Romero) writes:

   Well, enough of this gag.  But onto a more interesting question:
   
   ... [Jonathan's] manufacturer,
   a Taiwanese company, is looking at cloned Mac ROMS-- supposedly created
   'cleanly,' without reference to Apple's own-- as well.  
   
   Given the success of Phoenix, Award and DTK among others at cloning the
   PC BIOS withough legal problems, I don't see how Apple can deal with
   the cloned Mac ROMS through the usual lawsuits, unless they can
   demonstrate the 'uncleanness' of the ROMS.

While a company might theoretically be able to do for the Apple ROMs what
Phoenix did for the PC ROMs, in practice it looks a lot less feasible to
me, for several reasons.  The first is simply that the 128K ROMs (not to
mention any of the the 256K ROMs) have a lot more code than the 8K PC BIOS
ROM.  If it took huge amounts of money, time, and people to clone an 8K
ROM in a "clean room," it will take a lot more to clone the Mac ROMs.  Aside
from that, the structure of the Mac ROMs is a lot more complex than the
structure of the PC ROMs (the PC ROMs implement a small set of mutually
independent services, whereas the Mac ROMs implement a large set of
mutually interdependent ones).

The second major reason is that, not only is it a violation of Apple's
System Software License Agreement to use it on a non-Apple computer (which
might or might not stand up in court), it contains a fair amount of code
which depends on undocumented features/bugs in the ROM (such as the
"come-from" patches that everybody complains about in
comp.sys.mac.programmer :-)).  Thus, to be truly legal, the software
company would also have to do a clean-room clone of the System Software,
including such strange beasties as the Script Manager.  They would also
have to track Apple System releases, which would not be a fun time.  I
imagine such a company wouldn't be on Apple's seed lists... :-).

A good way to look at it would be to consider a PC clone manufacturer
who not only needed to clone the BIOS, but also MS-DOS, OS/2 and the
Presentation Manager.

It's possible, but it doesn't seem all that economical unless you do
at least a partial copy, which opens you up to Apple's lawyers again.

If anyone does do it, it will be an impressive feat indeed, but I'm
pretty skeptical, myself.

-- 
Amanda Walker, InterCon Systems Corporation
amanda@lts.UUCP / ...!uunet!lts!amanda / 703.435.8170
--
MS-DOS Delendo Est!