There is a story about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree that is meant to teach children about telling the truth. If only the folks producing CherryOS would have paid attention to that tale in elementary school.

I first read about CherryOS many months back, and thought it would be great to run OSX on my x86-based desktop computer. This way, when the wife needs to use the PowerBook, I could still get my fix of OSX-goodness.

Unfortunately, soon thereafter, it started to appear as a hoax. The website originally looked as though it was just thrown together quickly and offered quite an unprofessional presentation. The site also lacked alot of specific information about the product, and the company producing the product. It was a while ago, and the site has changed immensely since, but I even think there were broken links on the site. Even though the site has changed alot, there is much reason to still be skeptical.

Now, there seems to be overwhelming evidence that this new product is, in fact, the repackaging of the GPL-released PearPC project. Normally, this isn’t such a big deal. Lots of companies take GPL OSS and and repackage it for consumers. But, they abide by the GPL. It doesn’t appear that the folks responsibe for CherryOS have any intention of even admitting that it is based on PearPC (let alone abide by the GPL).

There are lots of great articles out there about this, and I have only read a couple. But, here are some worthy ones:

DrunkenBlog: The pits in CherryOS
Critical-Miss: Exposing the truth about CherryOS
Wired: CherryOS Re-Released, Still Fishy