Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard: In EULA we trust
Just before the release of Snow Leopard, Uncle Walt Mossberg did the unthinkable by writing that the $29 Leopard upgrade:
"will work properly on ...Tiger equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140."We reported that as well but didn't have all the facts verified at the time. Gizmodo likened Walt to a pirate and guessed that he'll have to apologize or at least clarify his position.
Now, after buying the family edition, I have done every sort of installation known to man and have the facts. It seems that Walt was right, but he didn't tell you the whole story. You can take the $29 upgrade disc and install it over Leopard, over Tiger, or over a freshly formatted hard drive. The disc doesn't care. Regardless of whether you pay $29, $49 or $169, you get the same disc with the same capabilities.
But just because you have a disc, if you use it for a purpose not intended upon purchase, you are breaking your agreement with Apple. The contents of the disc are the property of Apple and how that intellectual property is to be used is determined by the EULA (End User License Agreement) that you agree to before installation.
For each method of purchase the EULA is different. For the $169 package which includes iLife '09 and iWork '09 this is what you agree to:
"A. Single Use License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, unless you have purchased a Family Pack or Upgrade license for the Apple Software, you are granted a limited non-exclusive license to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-branded computer, or to enable others to do so. This License does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time."
Clear enough. You can use it on one computer. It doesn't say that you need any operating system to start with. I would assume that you can put it on as many hard disks as you want, as long as you only use those hard disks with one specified computer.
Sure, there's been a lot of speculation and discussion about the 
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