[olug] [Macintosh] Powermac G3, Ubuntu, and OS X

[William Haisch]

> Since you got the license with the machine, all you need to do is find
> someone that will loan you media.  It's not downloadable from Apple.

I am not a lawyer but I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify my 
understanding of Apple's OS licensing strategy that was imparted to me 
by our Apple Sales Reps.  We deal with this and other licensing 
frequently at work.

Apple's licensing strategy has been different for quite some time now.  
Previously, Apple allowed people upgrade for free.  All the customer 
needed to do was bring fresh floppies into their local Apple store and 
they could have the latest OS for free.  Apple terminated that practice 
with the release of Mac OS 7.0 in 1993.  Apple essentially does not 
care about the old Classic OS (Mac OS 9 and earlier) but they care a 
great deal about OS X.  Any major upgrade is a paid upgrade only (i.e. 
from 10.3 to 10.4), the only exception being individuals who were 
running 10.0 could upgrade to 10.1 for free.  Burning copies from ISOs 
and upgrading is not legal.  The right to use license that comes with 
your G3 is probably Mac OS 8.1 for the older beige G3 towers or Mac OS 
8.6 for the newer blue and white G3 towers.  Furthermore, OEM licenses 
cannot be transfered after an upgrade but retail licenses can.

On the hardware requirements side, you can safely run Mac OS 9.2.2 on 
this older machine.  If your G3 has built in Firewire ports, it should 
run OS X 10.3 fine.  I've done it before just make sure you have the 
most recent firmware, downloadable from Apple's Support Site.  You will 
have to have more RAM to run OS 10.4 (about 256 MB, suggest 512MB).

My name is Bill and I approved this message.