Better call Lional Hutz, he would know. It would be his best case since his law suit against the never ending story.

Anyways, I am referring to the sticker that is physically on every macintosh computer. it will have the s/n, the Mac address and then a description like the one I posted earlier.

How about laptops (ibook, pbook)?

Yes usually under the battery or under the keyboard you can find the sticker. it has a grayish/silver tone to it. On the desktops it is either on the back or on the panel where the case drops down. On Imacs I think its under the user access panel and on emacs it is on the back side of the user access panel. Some of the flat panel imacs had it on the tray to the optical drive (the part that drops down so the tray can eject).

You will see the serial number, the mac address and bar codes for both so you can scan it and then you will see the description

PB 1.25Ghz/256/80/OSX

It will say something like that.

First off, I have not read the previous posts, but...

In the case of a COMPUTER, the OS that was licensed with the computer when it was purchased originally follows the computer, not the media. If you sell a Mac, you are supposed to include all of the original media and documentation, and the license for the software follows the Mac. If you buy a Mac and it didn't come with media, you can call Apple and have replacement media (and usually agreements, etc) sent to you, for various fees.

Which Mac would be licensed? The computer it was originally installed on or for the computer of the person who physically has the DVD?

This makes a lot of sense. Then I can see buying "second-hand" computer install disks as purchasing replacement media for programs that you already have licenses for.

But your response is very different than the moderator's (yellow regarding a computer without the media).

All the materials included in the original packaging (including installation media and other software discs) are licensed for use with the specific machine they are bundled with only.

What is less clear is the license option for the commercial retail box of, say, Panther when one installs a fresh retail copy of Tiger on a machine. Since it's not really an upgrade, one might feel that the license for use of Panther has been freed up for transfer to another machine.

I'm curious to hear peoples' takes on that one.

That sounds right to me, Craig. If you're not running the OS on a machine any more, then it should seemingly be licit to run it on another. I'm not sure how that would go over at Apple if/when the OS was re-registered on another machine, however.

The originally bundled software including OS is licensed for the machine (which is why the newer discs say "iMac restore" and such), and the license travels with the machine.

The license with a commercially purchased copy of say, 10.3, is itself. You can sell it if it is not installed on any computer.

I know the license agreement for the OS bought commercially has how to transfer the license and sell it in it. I believe the computer license does too.

Hmm... I wonder if that applies to students in pre-school? If not, my little one will be starting kindie in less than two years. Will that count?

The educational discount is pretty liberally offered. My girlfriend is in grad school, so she officially qualifies. When I bought her an iBook, however, I used my credit card and my personal Apple Store account. I just went to the Apple store and clicked "education." I then bought her iBook and iPod at the lower rate, without ever having to confirm her student status. The only time I keyed in her name was to have it engraved in the Mini.

I even went so far as to call the local Apple campus rep to make sure it would go through without a problem. He said it would be fine, adding "homeschooled kids and their teachers (i.e. their parents) qualify for the educational discount."

I am certainly not advocating ineligible people take advantage of the discounts, just noting that Apple takes very reasonable and non-restrictive approach to offering them.

Someone at our Mac User Group was able to get an educational discount by saying that he knew a student and thought he might at sometime have a conversation about the program in question. So if Apple or their dealers want to interpret their own policies so liberally, go to it.

I've always had to provide proof that I'm a university faculty member when purchasing from sites like academicsuperstore.com, however. Apparently, they hold to pretty strict standards.

i think that the EULAs for educational software are pretty liberal. I have never had to show proof i work for a school system to get it. Plus some educational versions can be bought at retail stores, how are they going to effectively track that?

If you think about it, it really is smart business. For example our G5 animation labs at the school i work for have all the adobe software, maya, 3d studio max, (like 80 gigs of software, I am not kidding, it is insane - takes like 4 hours to make a new image) and they all work just like any other mac program. However, everytime you do a project it is watermarked with "EDUCATIONAL VERSION" in the background. Which means everytime you output (render) a project to its final format it will have that mark on it. You are not allowed to make any profit from educational versions either. So, technically if you purchased an educational version of software you could use it as normal for personal (educational) use. Now, if you wanted to turn a profit and get rid of that stupid watermark on your file you can purchase the full version. Now that you purchased software for a discount and are going to use it for your business and make money you can purchase the upgrade of the software to make it a legal version and get rid of that watermark. So, if you ever decide to go legit and make money off of your computer you can do so. If you want to use the software for your own personal reasons, or even to self educate yourself you can.

The advantage is to the company, it is along the same logic as why piracy is a good thing. Once someone has the money to go legit they will do so. Thus, buying all the software they already know. I play around with photoshop a little bit just so I can support users sometimes when they have a problem with that application. I cannot possibly learn every program that we use at the school system, it would take years. I can however learn a few of the ones I kind of like and it helps out my users.

I know for microsoft office you can purchase it as long as someone in your family is a student, and it is not upgradeable. Student/Teacher edition of MS office is around 150 dollars and it gets you the 300 dollar standard version of office. When the next version of office comes out you will not be able to upgrade from student/teacher ed. you will be forced to buy a full version of the new office or wait until the next version of student/teacher comes out.

Now with other applications it is hard to say they all have different fine print, but for the most part in my experiences they are pretty liberal about it. Students are not software companies main target of customers, but they are potential future customers. Then when they are no longer students and in the work force they will use whatever skills they have at their job. Meaning that their company buys more licenses for their employees, so they can make money for the company. In return the software company makes more money from more sales, and so on and so forth.

I can see how the animation apps can prevent someone from using them professionally by watermarking the output. On the other hand, Macromedia's web development apps are available in educational versions, and they don't do that. You can't very well watermark HTML (although I suppose they could watermark Flash if they wanted to). Then again, they are trivially easy to pirate anyway, and I'm sure they'd rather have professional web developers buying the educational version than getting it from a newsgroup.

Still, it's good to know about the parent of student eligibility. Cheap software for the next 18 years will at least partially offset the diapers, formula, food, clothing, college savings, car, insurance... eh, who am I kidding? :)

What ever the actual legal answer may be, it is all a conjured way of printing money. I make this statement as an apple share holder. I have no problem with business licensing as i deal in that also, if you make money from a product then fine. But when it comes to "family" licenses i think it's a bit rich. So There:)

Note that the family licenses are only for those who think it is morally wrong to use commercial software for which you haven't paid - i.e. using it illegally. It's an honour system - just like that used in many transit systems. It isn't costing the transport company any more if you bring your kids along - and you aren't likely to get caught, so the only reason to buy tickets for them is because that's the right thing to do.

i guess the answer is that each person makes their choice - and its down to your concience to decide how much money you pass on to the software developers etc. you could buy a copy of tiger and install it on 3 machines at your home, or you could buy the family license and be more fair/wholesome/legal.

your choice, but remember that saving a bit of money now might end up meaning that good developers stop developing....