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Comment by withinrafael | Hacker News Reader

GitHub has been doling out tiny macOS runners in virtual machines for a bit now [1] (seemingly in violation of macOS SLA), and these were hosted on MacStadium [2]! So for MacStadium to come out and pretend they were following the rules the entire time is disappointing.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github....

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.githu...

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How is this at all MacStadium "pretending" to follow the rules? At worst, this is GitHub violating the rules.

MacStadium is renting those macs to a single customer for longer than 24 hours. MacStadium is following the rules. MacStadium is just providing a platform.

You're not really expecting MacStadium to snoop on each customer's usage and business model to enforce Apple's rules? AWS certainly won't be doing that.

If Apple told MacStadium or AWS to stop offering Macs to a customer such as GitHub due to some EULA violation committed by GitHub, they would probably do that.

I don't understand why your comment is trying so hard to frame MacStadium as hypocrites.

> I don't understand why your comment is trying so hard to frame MacStadium as hypocrites.

MacStadium customer here. It's an arm's length setup. They don't ask what you're doing, just give you the keys to the machines. BUT, when MacStadium's (likely) biggest customer is running thousands of hosts for CI jobs, and even lists you as the vendor in their docs, it's perfectly obvious that multiple end user jobs are being run on that host per 24hr per.

It really boils down to who Apple is going to bother to audit / sue.

CI runners are kinda different than VM hosting. I mean sure you could abuse them to run sshd and interactively use them for a while :D but the service as intended is that you don't "rent" the VM in any meaningful way, it's fully theirs, they just run your one single job on it and show you the logs.

Prior to Big Sur, it's my understanding the macOS SLA explicitly disallowed this. Snippet:

> Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.

You could argue that the CI service is the "one user", and it doesn't make the software available over the network, it only makes logs available over the network.

This seems like a gray area, "does running a build on your behalf constitute renting out the build environment to you" is a very hard question.

I am not a lawyer but it doesn't seem like a gray area at all to me; you are providing inputs to GitHub and they provide the outputs of mac software over the internet.

What's maybe more of a gray area is whether apple can assert the user doesnt have these rights in their eula.

But "they provide the outputs" is the gray area – does providing the outputs count as renting out the software itself?

I can't see a way to frame it otherwise - it's certainly functionally identical in terms of effect, both on the end user's need and on Apple's interests to sell hardware.

As weird as it is, I think as long as they provide an entire physical Mac you’re free to run as many macOS virtual hosts on it yourself as you want to. At least that’s my understanding of the EULA explained in the MacStadium blog post.

Yeah I think the issue here is more likely GitHub not following the EULA

It seems we are making the assumption that GitHub/MacStadium are bound by the same terms as everyone else. There is nothing that says they can't get special treatment for some arbitrary reason.

The limitation is only from Big Sur. AWS chose to do it on Catalina so that customers may not experience a big change later on. This means any provider who uses < Big Sur is in compliance.

They would have been VMing on top of the machine provided by MacStadium.

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