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Comment by vishesh92 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this violate Apple's licenses? AFAIR, MacOS is illegal to run on non-Apple hardware.

You may violate Apple's EULA by running macOS on non-Apple hardware, but it's not illegal (it's not a criminal offence).

most people don't understand the difference between a civil offence and a criminal offence (which is what i would use the term "illegal" to describe).

Violating a contract is not "illegal", but is a civil offense, and requires the other party to sue you to recover damages. Copyright infringement is also not "illegal", but is a civil offense (however, i do believe that a lot of copyright lobbies want to change copyright violations to be a criminal offence, so they won't need to sue, but instead use public prosecution to recover their damages).

This is terrible legal advice. Criminal penalties for copyright infringement offenses have existed since at least 1897 in the United States, and at least 1921 in Canada.

While I understand the point you were trying to convey WRT the differences between civil and criminal offenses, copyright infringement is not a particularly good example of this.

> The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment. [0]

[0]: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime/piracy-ip...

It may be a violation of the DMCA, which makes it a criminal offence.

The only way this would violate the DMCA is if you pirated the operating system.

That depends pretty much on the jurisdiction.

I believe the MacOS license requires to run on Mac hardware, so in order to be compliant with the license you'd need to launch a big VM Linux on top of a beefy Mac Server then inside the big Linux VM provision all the MacOS VM instances you want using the utility mentioned in the post.

Unfortunately, you would fall afoul of their license doing this as well. They only allow you to virtualize two instances of macOS per host machine.

(iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.

Or just install Linux on the Mac normally, though that's only really possible on the older pre-T2 models.

Sorry but this misconception needs to die. You can still boot linux perfectly fine on a Mac with a T2. All that's needed is a setting change.

You could also be running this on Linux that happens to be running on Apple hardware.

Linux does not run on modern Macs. You can boot it but there are virtually no drivers for even the basics like Wifi.

At least on older models, the drivers (e.g. Broadcom wifi) exist but aren't distributed with the OS installer due to licensing restrictions.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Linux support for WiFi, audio, and suspend/hibernate has been completely broken on 15” MacBook Pros since the 2016 models hit (WiFi still works on the 13” MBPs, afaik).

Wow! I didn't know that. I "switched back" when there was no pro/NVidia option available to me about 7 years ago.

I don’t think informing people about ways to do things that go against software licenses violates the license.

Also, following these instructions doesn’t necessarily violate Apple’s license. You can run Linux on Apple hardware, and install Mac OS X on top of it, can’t you?

Finally, IANAL, but software licenses likely aren’t enforceable to consumers in large parts of the world (a shrink-wrap “take it or leave it” probably wouldn’t be considered an agreement between parties in many courts, and that’s what you need to call something a license)

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