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Comment by joeyo | Hacker News Reader

  They way they re-enabled iTunes sync is by changing their
  USB id to be the same as Apple's.

What about this do you find objectionable? Do you deplore reverse engineering too?

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How about this for a reason to find this tactic objectionable: USB is a standard with a licensing body which mandates the acceptable USB protocol behavior of vendors that slap the approved USB logo on their product/box, part of the licensing agreement which Palm signed mandates that they supply their proper vendor id (in this case 0 × 0830 (Palm Inc.)) during negotiation. What Palm did was change the vendor id they were supplying to Apple's vendor id. Palm is in violation of a licensing agreement they willingly entered into. If they want to follow this tack they should at least be forced to remove the USB-compatible logo from their product and its marketing materials.

  If they want to follow this tack they should at least be
  forced to remove the USB-compatible logo from their product
  and its marketing materials.

This sounds reasonable.

When you sign up for Vendor ID you sign under these words:

  Unauthorized use of assigned or unassigned USB Vendor ID
  Numbers and associated Product ID 
  Numbers are strictly prohibited.

http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/VID_Only_Form_withCCAut...

Would you find some random guy using you SSN (or equivalent if you are not from US) obectionable?

The analogy is broken: SSN is a credential. USB vendor IDs are not.

It's not about what it is. It's about how would you feel if someone else would use it. Especially when it is clearly forbidden.

I think I understand your point, but I respectfully submit that it's a bit of a stretch to turn identity theft into something like "computer identity theft". The arguments being presented by you and others boil down to an assertion that Palm behaved fraudulently by emulating Apple's USB device IDs.

But while I think it's useful to talk about defrauding other humans, it makes no sense to me to to talk about a computer defrauding another computer, at least, not yet :-D. This is where the analogy breaks down, in my opinion, and why I don't have any moral problems with what Palm is doing. A far closer analogy would be Compaq's emulation of the original PC BIOS.

I don't think anyone is asserting that Palm is intending to trick reasonable humans into thinking that their Pre is actually an iPod device. Everyone realizes that they are offering an iPod compatible device. To achieve this end, they are having their device "defraud" another computer. I'm okay with this. At worst, they have perhaps violated their licensing agreement with the USB Implementers forum. If so, this could be remedied by removing the USB logo from the Pre, and then even this argument dissolves.

It's treading where they are obviously unwanted. That's not a good way to do business or instill faith.

About ten years ago, Be wanted to have BeOS be an alternative OS you could run on Macs. Be did in fact get the first version running okay. But Apple was in the midst of one of its big hardware changes, so Be needed tech docs for the motherboard to do a really good job of it. Apple never supplied that information.

BeOS advocates at the time said: just go ahead and reverse engineer it. That's what the Linux people did. The powers that be at Be said: nope, we don't play that way. If Apple doesn't want us on their computers, then we're not going there. Be subsequently refocused on standard PC hardware.

And where's Be now? Dead. Where's Apple? Still acting like twits and preventing OS X from running on standard PC hardware, you still have to go to Apple to buy their hardware.

I don't get your point.

I would hardly call that "acting like twits".

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. --Alan Kay

While MicroSoft expends all of their resources testing their OS with every possible piece of hardware and its associated drivers, Apple gets to focus on making great products. They don't have to wait on the hardware manufacturers to innovate, and they don't have to support their shoddy hardware and drivers. They also don't have to take the blame when it doesn't work. MicroSoft does (earned or not).

Apple gets to focus on making great products. They don't have to wait on the hardware manufacturers to innovate, and they don't have to support their shoddy hardware and drivers.

Not wanting to test your OS with a myriad of different hardware is one thing. Stopping VMWare from supporting it as a guest OS is another. There's no technical reason that I shouldn't be able to run OSX on top of VMWare (I know there's hacks to get it to work, but it's slow as molasses).

Apple is more than happy to allow VMWare to develop and sell Fusion so I can run Windows on top of Apple hardware. How is it that they don't allow me to run OSX on top of my Windows box?

This is an interesting example. I'd argue that if Be had not abandoned the Mac market they might have had a better fate than to be merely bought by, ironically, Palm!

Where is Be now?

It is part of Palm, Inc.

Bought by Palm.

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