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Can a Hardware Platform be Closed?
By Jacob Cohen | January 29, 2008
In the comments left for Jeff Atwood’s recent post on closed platforms, there is a discussion about his comparison between traditional dongles and the hardware of the Apple Macintosh itself.
A user named Brandon left the comment,
I’m not sure Apple hardware, say PPC and Intel on, counts as much of a dongle. Especially Intel based hardware. You can freely install any OS you want on it, they [Apple] even bundle the Windows drivers for all the proprietary hardware, backlight keyboard, webcam, volume, eject button, etc.. on the Leopard install disc.
He has the meaning of dongle reversed here. The point isn’t that you can’t install other stuff onto the Mac, the point is that the software won’t run on anything else. This is enforced by the license agreement as well as a hardware key (dongle) which is the Mac itself.
In the age of ubiquitous virtualization of computer hardware, however, the hardware dongle is not nearly as hard to copy as it used to be. Consider it like The Matrix for computers. The software only sees the interfaces exposed by the operating system. The operating system only sees the interfaces exposed by the hardware it is running on.
The operating system doesn’t know if it can trust what it is getting from the hardware, or indeed if it is even running on hardware at all. This is probably the issue that causes Apple to disallow running their OS X software product inside a virtualization server. They recently updated their license to allow virtual server instances of OS X Leopard, but only on Apple hardware.
Also, while I am not privy to Microsoft’s motivations behind the Palladium project (now known as the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, I suspect this issue had something to do with it. Otherwise, what’s to prevent someone from installing 20 copies of Windows XP onto different instances of a virtual PC that emulates the same processor ID and MAC address? What would be unique about any given installation of Windows that the operating system software could trust when trying to determine if it is a legitimate copy?
This leads to the question, can a hardware platform ever truly be as closed as the manufacturer would like? Or will they always have to fall back on licensing restrictions to discourage cloning and manipulation of their product? I don’t think we’ve seen the answer to this yet.
Topics: General |
