Do snow leopard disks have licence keys?

whitedragon101 said:

My girlfriends laptop HD has died and I have a new one ready to slot in. However, both her Snow Leopard disk (boxed not grey) and Leopard disk (gray) are in Ireland (we are in the UK).

I have my Snow Leopard (boxed copy not grey) that I used to upgrade my laptop right here next to me. Can I use it to install an OS to her new HD or is there some licence identifier or code that gets installed that will cause a problem if we are both using OS's installed from the same disk?

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No, they do not have license keys.

You're in the world of Mac... No license keys for OS X. You are free to install on any Mac you like.

SantaRosa2.2 said:

You're in the world of Mac... No license keys for OS X. You are free to install on any Mac you like.

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The grass really is greener!

SantaRosa2.2 said:

You're in the world of Mac... No license keys for OS X. You are free to install on any Mac you like.

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Well, you can, but it is still technically breaking the license agreement.

whitedragon101 said:

My girlfriends laptop HD has died and I have a new one ready to slot in. However, both her Snow Leopard disk (boxed not grey) and Leopard disk (gray) are in Ireland (we are in the UK).

I have my Snow Leopard (boxed copy not grey) that I used to upgrade my laptop right here next to me. Can I use it to install an OS to her new HD or is there some licence identifier or code that gets installed that will cause a problem if we are both using OS's installed from the same disk?

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There is no license key or activation system as Apple is generally opposed to DRM.

rikbrown said:

Well, you can, but it is still technically breaking the license agreement.

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But the girlfriend has a legit copy/install of Snow Leopard, it's just not with her. I wouldn't worry about helping her.

leman said:

There is no license key or activation system as Apple is generally opposed to DRM.

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Except on nearly every iTunes download for the past decade. They love DRM.

The main reason OSX doesn't have licence keys is that the cost is underwritten by the massive hardware markup, that and you can't install a retail copy on any other manufacturer's machines.

NutsNGum said:

Except on nearly every iTunes download for the past decade. They love DRM.

The main reason OSX doesn't have licence keys is that the cost is underwritten by the massive hardware markup, that and you can't install a retail copy on any other manufacturer's machines.

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I often wonder why this opinion is still this popular. People often think of Apple as this 'big evil company' (I am not saying that it isn't), but in fact, they have been mostly anti-DRM for the last few years now.

The iTunes music is mostly DRM free since 2009. No Apple software I am aware of has DRM (some more expensive stuff has license keys, but there is no online activation/validation system if I am not mistaken) and there is also no DRM on the App Store downloads unless the App creator explicitly chose to incorporate some.