Did this (or something very like it) -actually happen-?? If so, I'm also confused and staring with a definite o_O expression.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8497291.stm

Somehow, I can see Ubersoft trying something like that. Maybe abuse Phil into writing it so it actually works?

... while you're 100% right about Apple, I dislike Steve Jobs so intensely I can't manage to dredge up any sympathy for him. A man whose first act coming back to a company is to screw over business partners who entered into an arrangement with the company in good faith (i.e. clone makers) deserves to be stolen from until the day he dies, and then a few decades after that.

First off, the decision to kill off cloning was made before Jobs became CEO. He was just the figurehead who had to talk about it in public after Amelio left. At the time, I was following the soap opera which is Apple Computer in the tech press closely, and that was a done deal whether Jobs wanted it or not. (As I recall, he agreed with the decision, but that's not really relevant.)

The second thing is that the clone makers had explicitly agreed to not cannibalize Apple's own markets, and after a year they were doing exactly that. (The whole idea is that the clone makers would approach new markets, such as the business world, which traditionally considered Macs too expensive. They were supposed to build those stripped-down-but-expandable Macs that pundits are always so sure will succeed if only Apple would make them. As it turned out, they tried that and discovered that nobody wanted them, then started directly copying Apple's products and pushing them to existing users. I used to have an issue of Macworld from that era with an advertisement which boiled down to "why pay more for an Apple-branded computer when you can get our compatible machines for less?") The clone makers were hardly the bunch of innocents you make them out to be, and they were costing Apple more than they were bringing in in licensing fees.

(And also -- although this has no bearing on whether withdrawing from the clone agreements was justified or not, or done fairly -- frankly, the clones were no good. I bought a PowerTower Pro 225 from Power Computing back in fall of 1996. What they didn't tell consumers in advance is that outside of the CPU and ROM they were using cruddy components which had no driver support in the OS. Over the 6 years I kept that machine, I ended up spending roughly twice what I had saved by buying a clone in order to pay for upgrades to the third-party drivers which were necessary to safely keep using the internal hard drive and CD-ROM drive as the OS was updated. FWB made a mint through sales of CD-ROM Toolkit and Hard Disk Toolkit from anyone who bought a PowerTower Pro and who wanted to stay up to date, as all developers kind of need to do. And don't get me started on the Twin Turbo graphics card. Ick. In the end, I had to give the thing away instead of reselling it, because nobody would want to pay money for an old machine which required as much babysitting as that.)

rhl2000 is now our second verified user in order to deal with the spam filter problem...

Sure, the clones worked fine -- until you tried to upgrade the OS. Then you started to have buggy behavior and unsupported drivers, which could only be solved by forking over more cash, and more the next time, and so on. If all you had to deal with was a clone which someone else was taking care of -- or which you weren't going to have to upgrade yourself -- then they were fine, but then, those are the times when you were basically dealing with Apple's software, not some third party's hardware, right?

At the time of the clone makers, Apple was still on System 7, and that was indeed getting pretty decrepit. To give those of you who aren't Mac users some context, System 7.0 came out in 1991. The PowerPC Macs came out in 1994, running 7.1.2, which was the final 7.1 release. The clone era was 7.5 to 7.6, which doesn't sound so bad until you realize that they skipped all the numbers between 7.1.2 and 7.5. Copland (named after the composer, so there's no "e") was supposed to be Mac OS 8, and was going to be a rewrite of the Mac OS from the ground up to add a bunch of the low-level features missing from the Classic Mac OS (preemptive multitasking, protected memory, true multiuser support, etc.). They also had a team working on concepts for what would have been the successor to Copland, which was called Gershwin. (A lot of those concepts have been quietly added to the OS in one way or another, although not all of them stuck -- Themes got axed from the Appearance Manager, for example, and the Appearance Manager doesn't even exist in Mac OS X.)

The problem was that Copland never really got anywhere; every week, the development team would hold a meeting and say "okay, multitasking isn't working, and neither are any of the other big new features, so let's work on those for next week", and then they'd come back the next week and the 'progress' would be a few new icon designs, and there was never any accountability for that, so the whole project failed. They did release an alpha to the highest-tier paid membership of the developer program; it basically would crash as soon as you tried to run anything, including the included sample programs.

I agree with you that BeOS was great -- I kept the giveaway PowerPC RC2 (I think) install CD until I no longer had any PowerPC Macs around to run it on. BeOS is where all the fun went, really. And it was really, really fast. (And the open-source successor to it, Haiku -- which I strongly urge you to try if you can -- is still really, really fast, and is a treat to play with. I take every opportunity to plug it, because I'd really like it to succeed. Linux as a desktop OS is horrible; Haiku is terrific -- except that it has terrible hardware support, some incomplete parts, and basically can't be used as a server. But if you want to run a netbook, for example...) But it had two big problems: (A) it's a single-user system with no real user access control, just like "Classic" Mac OS, and (B) it was in the hands of Jean-Louis Gassee.

There was an interview with Amelio published a year or so after Apple bought Next where they asked why Apple didn't buy Be. What came out is that Gassee kept asking for more and more stuff because he thought he had Apple over a barrel. Gassee would ask for X amount of money and Y shares of Apple stock, in addition to a list of non-monetary demands. Apple would take that to the board, who would discuss it and agree, and then Gassee would ask for 1.5*X money and 2*Y shares of stock instead. After a few rounds of that -- and demanding that Apple put him (Gassee) in charge of everything -- they gave up on him. A pity, because BeOS was almost what Mac OS 8 should have been, except for the "still a single-user system" part. But in terms of deserving no pity, Gassee beats Jobs hands down.

It may indeed have required time to make inroads into the business world -- but the clone makers weren't even trying. Where were the clone Appleshare servers which would have been necessary? (Answer: nowhere.) Where were the stripped down clones? Oh, right, they gave up on those almost immediately because it was easier to compete with Apple.

As for renegotiation of the OS license: you do realize that if Apple had finished and released Copland, the clone makers would have had no license for that, right? Copland was always intended to be version numbered as OS 8, and the clone licenses only applied to 7.x. (That was how the destruction of the clone makers was really enforced; the non-Copland release version of Mac OS 8 was numbered 7.7 in developer releases up shortly before it was announced publicly.)