"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours"
These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?
These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?
https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te...
From the new EULA (not just for Amazon, paraphrased by 9to5mac):
* Apple software and hardware must be leased “in its entirety to and individual or organization”
* A lease period must be “for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours”
* Customers must now accept software agreements for all installed software of leased hardware
* All of these changes are only offered for “Permitted Developer services,” which are now spelled out for users
* Developers may now “install, use, and run additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments”
* The “lessor” such as Macstadium is fully responsible for making sure that all of these new requirements are upheld
It's ok to take the literal definition of the word monopoly and take it to its logical conclusion, I suppose. The U.S. government will not do that, however.
So this is hard to defend other than gouging.
And under the new EULA they don't allow renting a VM, only a device in its entirety
Likewise, you might read it that Circle is simply providing a service to users, and the users are paying a fee for the service.
But a CI service will set up your dev account, your container image, to run your jobs. It'll even let you shell in, and it tears it all down when you're done.
And it really starts to look like leasing when they also charge for time used on various hosts. (IIRC, Circle charges for this a bit obliquely as max parallelism.)
If it went to court, Circle might argue the hosts can only be used within their larger CI system, that they don't guarantee a particular task will complete on a given host, and that they're not providing other requirements for virtual hosts, e.g. dedicated routing or names. And then Apple's lawyers might counter all that.
So this is where I think lawyers would start digging through case law to figure out where providing a service ends and leasing begins.
(Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)
IMO their price gouging is ethically much worse than someone making a hackintosh and using it to enrich the MacOS software ecosystem.
And sued.
As an aside, in the script you link to is this line
> VBoxManage setextradata "${vm_name}" "VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey" "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"
I think that’s Apple’s way of reminding you about their rules regarding host machines.
Live by the walled garden die by the walled garden
Microsoft's licensing for clouds is also a pain in the arse. You (the cloud platform) have to pay for a full months license the moment an instance is created. The way it's structured you have some wriggle room, e.g. you have your placement algorithm land new instances on where Windows instances have already been in a given month, so you don't incur additional licenses (because the license "transfers"). It gets worse if you start wanting to do things like run SQL Servers, where it's the entire month license outright with no prorating, and it applies to a specific instance instead of the machine/VM slot.
Strangely enough, despite all the trends in the market, operating system vendors are determined to make it harder for people to pay them to use their stuff, rather than easier.
This is exactly how I would expect the licensing to work.
It's difficult for me to believe that a hyper-scaled cloud deployment like AWS will rent individual mac minis to people. It sounds like a business idea I would have and then come to realize how labor intensive and inefficient the entire thing was.
At the same time, I wonder why there is not a well developed, well documented cross-compiling toolchain available for (whatever you are doing with a mac build server) ? Why not use your local (laptop) mac to do the dirty work and then run a (very complicated) cross compiling chain on a much cheaper, non mac, cloud instance ?
Even more interestingly, I wonder if this could be an exploratory step for an Apple that's thinking about designing dedicated cloud chips.