Thursday, March 10, 2005

Is CherryOS a Rip-Off of PearPC?

Note: We have been having problems all day with Blogger. It was not even possible to post any news today until right now. Our apologies for the delay.

On with the news....

CherryOS got a good deal of write-up yesterday, when the $50 program was formally rolled out. For those who missed it, CherryOS is a Mac OS X emulator for the PC (of course I would ask, why would you ever want to do that to a PC, but I digress.) According to Wired News, the program may also be a re-packaging of an open source emulator project called PearPC. Here's what they had to report:

"The company became embroiled in controversy last October when it offered a preview release, which experts said was simply a repackaging of a free, open-source emulator called PearPC. Dave Schroeder, a senior systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at both October's preview release and Tuesday's release and did not like what he found.

'"I'm surprised at the gall of some people," Schroeder said. "This is obviously PearPC.... When you examine the executables, it's still got so many identical strings that aren't just generic. CherryOS is still using significant amounts, if not all, of PearPC's code as the emulation engine."

'But Maui X-Stream President Jim Kartes categorically denied using any of PearPC's code. "That's driving me crazy," Kartes said. "We are building an emulator like they are that uses Mac language. PearPC uses Mac language and next thing you know, they say we are using their code. This is a totally different architecture."'

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