My interpretation of Mr Bailey's post does not support the notion that a lawsuit is "not too far fetched". He even challenges Nathan Brookwood to defend his position which tells me he does not agree with the idea that a lawsuit is probable. It appears to me that the Digidyne v. Data General case is drastically different from the Apple/Intel situation therefore, no lawsuit based on this precendent is remotely conceivable.

The other statement by Mr Green regarding the market share having little to do with what is considered a monopoly neither supports nor opposes the idea of a lawsuit under these circumstances. He is merely clarifying an issue that many who disagreed with your blog were using as a rebuttal.

Given the litigious society in which we live, I would not be surprised if a lawsuit of this nature were filed and even heard by the courts. However, I must concur with the others that Apple is not engaging in restraint of trade simply because they have changed the CPU architecture from proprietary to an industry standard.

IANAL but I never meant to suggest that winning a lawsuit on this issue would be a slam dunk. It's likely that any PC supplier who has the dollars to pursue such an issue would also have the sense to avoid tilting at windmills for questionable economic gain. Apple would have to achieve a substantial increase in its market share before such a quest would be worth the effort. Nevertheless, should some aggrieved party try to bring such an issue before the courts, I suspect they'd be able to get past the "frivolous lawsuit" stage and get an honest hearing.

In the unlikely event Apple's Macintosh market share ever gets to the point where others want to feast on the crumbs they leave behind, I will monitor the court proceedings closely, and reserve the right to say "I told you so," regardless of the success or failure of the plaintiff's case.

[Just out of curiosity, is the James Bailey who commented the same fellow who was the marketing muscle behind "Thinking Machines?"]

Apple could state that it's operating system is FREE.
Open Darwin is available. So it would be suicide for a lawyer to aruge for Apple to OEM the operating system.

Now the user interface layer, aka MacOS X, only operates on Apple machines... or does it.

This layer was OpenStep, nee, NextStep. This layer ran on SunOS, HP-UX, the NextOS, and Windows.

I'm sure when Apple has more mindshare in the applications area, it will sell the application layer for Windows, and hopefully Linux X86. You will not get the MacUI, but you will get the Applications (iPhoto, keynote, etc).

How to kill a lawsuit... Let the other sides lawyers run up the bill and the hype for a while... Let the bollgers run rampant... Free publicity..
Then release the application layer, and charge a bundle for developers to sell apps on other OS's.

I remember the Apple vs Frankin Computers suit and I wonder if it is relevent to any of this?

Apple's OS-X is based on FreeBSD- which is, as the name implies, free. Apple has added on to FreeBSD with it's Darwin interface and various packages (iTunes, iLife, etc.) Would they really be required to OEM these products, as there are alternative products available?

Correction: OS X is based on Darwin, which is Mach 3.0 microkernel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_kernel) plus FreeBSD services. The user interface is Aqua.

So Pepsi could be sued for a monopoly at Butler University and Coke could be sued for a monopoly at Indiana University?

As to the "various packages" that Bill Perkins mentions, Apple's "iToons" software is already freely available for the Windows operating system, and I know of many people who use that version on their laptop PC - of what ever manufacture. If the demand for other applications in the iLife suite were there, I'm sure Apple would get around to making a port available at the same cost as the OS-X version.

But Apple does not now, nor did they previously, target their MacOS at, or claim to support, IBM clones. IBM clones have a myraid of OSs available, Solaris, BSD Unix, Darwin, Linux, OpenBEOS, Windows. With several of these being open source, it is all but impossible for them to disappear, even if windows and solaris did. Even Solaris might be resurected by open source developers. And since the IBM clones were never designed with MacOS in mind anyways, common sense dictates the likelyhood of any major manufacturer wanting to pursue this is negligeable.

Hmm... I think the real issue will be if Dell or HP wants to make their own Mac-compatible x86 hardware, what is Microsoft going to say about it?

Plus, the new x86 Macs use a slightly different BIOS that isn't supported by Windows

Have you read about the lawsuit on prepress software for variable data printing? It is about RR Donnely a HUGE printing company suing Quark and Kodak/Creo for patent infringement on prepress software, it was all developed on Mac OS X.