Huzzah! Throw up the flags! Send off the fireworks! Summon the townspeople! Apple has lost! The people have won! Huzzah!

I’m referring, of course, to Monday’s ruling by The Library of Congress, which explicitly carves out a legal exception for those looking to jailbreak their iPhones. No longer will industrious little hackers (or those who downloaded a one-button jailbreak app off the Interwebs) be subject to Digital Millennium Copyright Act smack-downs over their choice of Cydia instead of the App Store.

In short, so long as you’re jailbreaking your iPhone to make it work with a third-party application that, itself, isn’t kosher on a vanilla iPhone, you’re in the clear. I’m not quite sure what you would do with a jailbroken phone otherwise—perhaps smash it with a hammer to test its durability or something--but there you have it.

Now, we’ve won, right? The choice of how and why you use your iPhone has finally been wrested out of the turtleneck-laden hands of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The people are in control now, and we all have carte blanche to do with our handheld devices as we please! Yay!

Yay?

Fifty words.

That's all it takes for Apple to crush your dreams: Fifty little words. In fact, it's only one word--technically a hyphenated compound of two words--that spoils the flavor of the soup.

"Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, unless you have purchased a Family Pack or Upgrade license for the Apple Software, you are granted a limited non-exclusive license to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at a time." (emphasis mine)

Don't get the pitchforks and torches out just yet, faithful Maximum PC readers. We're all geeks here. There's nothing wrong about wanting to do a little experimentation. You can say it just as easily as I can: Some parts of OS X are simply superior to what you might find in any Windows-based environment.

The point is ultimately moot, however, because Apple simply won't allow its operating system to exist on any platform but its own. It's not like there's much of a technological gap to leap: If the industrious (albeit illegal) third-party hackers can get OS X to work in a Windows-based virtual environment, I bet the smart minds over in the engineering department at One Infinite Loop can figure it out in short order.

So... why haven't they?