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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Kind of hilarious. This is barely cloud computing compared to the rest of ec2, which has per-second billing...

It's going to be out of their hands on this one. Apple have pretty strong EULAs.

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.

Strategically it makes sense. Apple is a hardware company, so making it difficult to run their OS in the cloud means more people need to keep buying their hardware. Microsoft has their own cloud, where they don't have to deal with the license requirements they force on other cloud providers, which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors (when it comes to windows servers). The key is that these companies don't just sell operating systems. Red Hat on the other hand, which doesn't have competing market pressures, is much more friendly to licensing in a cloud environment.

Does Microsoft have to follow its own EULA? Will it be an antitrust violation if they don't?

No, Microsoft owns it's software it does not need a license to use it.

But is using legal mechanisms to reduce a competitor's advantage (where the competitor licenses your product) considered to be antitrust? In the internet explorer case one of the major disputes was whether Microsoft manipulated its API to favour explorer versus other software.

IANAL, but I think only if you have monopoly power (at least as I understand US antitrust law), and MS doesn't really have a monopoly on the server OS market.

> 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.

This is exactly how I would expect the licensing to work.

Can't you also bring your own licenses for AWS/Windows? This all makes sense to me too... if you want to run a Windows instance, you need a license for Windows (on top of the hardware fee). Microsoft says that AWS can loan you a license (if you need one), but AWS would still need to hold a full license.

In terms of "other people's computers" it seems to fit well. Nice to be able to build/CI test against macOS without having to provision and maintain apple hardware.

You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed.

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

It's against Apple's T&Cs, though. If you're doing it at home by yourself, who cares. But a company that's interested in automated testing etc. isn't going to see it as an answer.

Get an old old old Mac pro from ages ago. Upgrade its motherboard. Then upgrade its RAM. Then upgrade its hard drive. Then upgrade its power supply. It will still be an "Apple-branded computer" because of its case. It will just have received a bunch of upgrades. Big "haha" to them.

(Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)

That sounds like a waste of time and money.

Definitely not a waste of money. Apple charges $1200+ for a soldered-in 4TB SSD that I can buy for $400 and upgrade in the future.

IMO their price gouging is ethically much worse than someone making a hackintosh and using it to enrich the MacOS software ecosystem.

Shortcut: Build a hackintosh, then stick it in an Apple case. Profit.

You “can”, in a technical sense, but not legally—Apple’s licensing for macOS only allows it to be run on Apple hardware. (You can run a macOS domU on another OS’s hypervisor, but that hypervisor has to be running on a Mac.) This matters when you’re a corporation.

You can't really test apps if there's no graphics acceleration. If you want graphics acceleration, you'll need to run a macOS VM with GPU passthrough using virtio or Proxmox. I did that for a bit until I just gave up and bought a Mac.

Your legal department is going to be stoked when you try that at work.

They will never know if you don't tell them. Copenhagen interpretation -- if it isn't observable it doesn't exist.

Highly recommend not hiding legal issues from your company's lawyers. That's a good way to get fired.

And sued.

This works if you aren't successful. If you are, it will get out.

People pointing out that this may be against ToS. But that might not be the case depending on which country you're in.

I don’t know about the legalities, but according to Apple you are only allowed to run macOS on real Mac hardware. Anything else is probably an EULA violation or something.

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.

You will get your Apple Developer account terminated if they ever find out.

Live by the walled garden die by the walled garden

Screw the walled garden. Build web apps.

If you're making an awesome app that many Mac users use and depend on, they would be stupid to terminate your dev account.

Epic Games would beg to differ...

Travis CI offers MacOS runners out of the box.

Now anyone has MacOS runners mostly out of the box.

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