The issue of licensing Mac OS to third party clone manufacturers will continue to be thorn in side of Apple Computer Inc until at least September, when it expects the final negotiations over terms and conditions to be complete. At the same time as Steve Jobs yesterday trumpeted Macintosh cloners such as Power Computing and Umax are essential to the Apple ecosystem, other executives were berating Power Computing for talking publicly about its new license arrangement and accused the company of spreading panic in the marketplace. In fact, Apple said, although Power Computing disclosed details of an apparent settlement with its on new licensing terms for MacOS in a recent SEC filing, terms of final agreement won’t be nailed down until September, and in its view they will not appear the way Power Computing has described them. Apple says its licensing criteria must be to expand the business, not Apple replacement business. Power Computing CEO Joel Kocher accused Apple of dragging out the negotiations, and urged users to put pressure on Jobs, who he believes has a negative attitude towards the clonemakers. Another thorny issue for Apple Computer Inc remains its commitment to – or lack of – support for the CHRP Common Hardware Reference Platform. Although MacOS 8 supports CHRP – it will boot from CHRP systems – the company has been making less than enthusiastic noise about support going forward. Intended to enable the Mac operating system and software to run on any computer conforming to CHRP, Apple now says it wants CHRP to be less hardware implementation-specific and more of an architecture. For the record, the clonemakers’ current MacOS licenses do not cover CHRP. For the record, Apple says its PowerPC hardware strategy is not under review and doesn’t plan to adopt Intel Corp processors for use in its products.
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