Macs are cool. Another little company wants to make its own to sell. Fair play or a violation of license agreements?

The line between legitimate market leverage and having a monopoly is a hazy one. Historically, at least in the computer business, the U.S. Courts have not always favored the original company when a clone appears. In fact, IBM lost the fight battling the world’s first third party clone company, Compaq, when it reverse engineered IBM’s BIOS chip and made its own Personal Computers (PC), paving the way for Gateway, DELL, and PC world domination.

Back in the 1990s, Apple Computer did allow another company to produce Macintosh clones running its operating system — Power Computing. But recently, despite changing the Mac’s architecture to Intel and thus making its operating system capable of running on most of the world’s PCs, its policy has been to lock the operating system to its own computers, with one exception, the Axiotron Modbook.

Now, a Florida-based company Psystar is defying the Apple OS’s license agreement by offering its own computers bundled with OS X Leopard. But it has neither reverse engineered like Compaq, nor become an official third party like Axiotron.

Apple likely forged an agreement with Axiotron because it felt it could offer a better Mac tablet than it could (for now, anyway). There is some benefit to having more OS X Leopard users out there. But why would it want to allow a clone that is, well… ugly?

Via The New York Times