CherryOS developer MXS caused quite a stir late last year with the announcement of CherryOS, an application that would emulate the Macintosh operating system on a Windows PC. Soon after news of CherryOS hit, fans of the open source PearPC cried foul saying that CherryOS had copy copied from the open source project and were selling it as commercial software.
A note on the developers Web site on Tuesday says, “CherryOS is On Hold – until further notice.”
Developers of CherryOS have not replied to repeated requests from MacCentral for comment.
According to the CherryOS developer, the virtual machine emulated by Cherry OS featured full network capabilities and has complete access to the host computer’s hardware resources — hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem.
However, It wasn’t long before accusations surfaced that CherryOS contained code from the open source PearPC project. Bloggers all over the Internet starting posting examples of how similar the two applications’ code really was.
One blog noted that there were PearPC graphics embedded inside the CherryOS executable. They also noted that if you put “the PearPC executable into the same folder as CherryOS.exe and run a program to run a comparison of the code, and you start finding all kinds of code matches, string matches (think english sentences), etc.”
PearPC declined to comment for this story citing “tactical and legal reasons.”