Chris Betcher

With the impending release of Mountain Lion , Apple's new version of the OS X operating system, I've been giving some thought to whether I'll bother upgrading or not. I am, or at least I used to be, what many would refer to as a Mac Fanboy. I still think Apple builds the best consumer computer hardware on the planet, and, so far anyway, OS X is probably still the best desktop/laptop operating system currently available. A few years ago I would not have included the "probably" qualifier in that last sentence, but lately I'm feeling more and more disenfranchised with Apple and their litigious nature and walled garden approach to creating customer lock-in. It's not that I don't like their products. I do. I have several Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. Walled garden or not, they build beautiful products that -  for the most part - do exactly what they claim... they just work. While I don't always approve of their proprietary attitude to the way the...

I was cleaning up my home office recently and I found a couple of installation disks for Apple's OS X Tiger operating system, 10.4.7. They must have come with the Macbook Pro I bought back in early 2006, and since that time I've upgraded  several times, to 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion), and in the not too distant future I'm sure I'll make the move to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Because I have absolutely no need to keep the OSX Tiger disks, I figured I'd sell them on eBay. After all, they might be of some use to someone with an older Mac who wants to stay on that older version of the OS, or who possibly has lost or damaged their original disks. I listed them online for $1, eBay's minimum bid, and hoped that they  might be of some benefit to someone, somewhere. Less than 24 hours after listing them, I get an email from eBay telling me they had to pull the ad after getting a takedown notice from the Business Software Alliance . "Your item was remo...