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Comment by withinrafael | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...

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It's obviously under NDA. I don't even understand why someone would open up this issue. How is Github complying with Mac os license? The obvious answer is that Github worked something out with Apple, that would then be secret. Github (Microsoft) has many lawyers under their employ that would have looked at this, said if their implementation breaks the license, or they came up with an alternative license with Apple. It seems weird that people jump up to gotcha questions between two $Trillion corps.

I opened the issue because when I spun up a macOS runner, it was not requiring me to "review and agree to be bound by the terms applicable to any software preinstalled on the Apple Software [...]" per the terms. Was I somehow implicitly bound by them? I was not comfortable with that legal risk and figured I'd ask the awkward question.

Makes me think of Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. I wish I knew the details, but it was apparently unsupported by VMware.

I believe that Apple internally has plans to compete with AWS and Google Cloud in the long term, but with M1 chips. There have been rumors[0][1] about this, and it's a logical step.

Not a far leap to speculate that Microsoft/GitHub has been granted early access to that program.

[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4466949-new-leak-suggests-a...

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/16/apple-planning-to-rival...

I seriously, seriously doubt that.

Apple has needs for serving 1+ Billion of its customers. IS&T has been known to be a complete pile of crap ( plenty of evidence on HN alone ). A dozens of hiring seems more to me like trying to fix things rather than compete. The will need hundreds if not thousands as bare minimum.

They have been pitting Azure against AWS and GCP against Azure to gain extremely favourable terms.

They're already doing it somewhat with Xcode Cloud, which does remote builds in Apple's infrastructure[1]. They might not directly compete with AWS, Azure or GCP in products one to one, but it's not unreasonable to assume they will expand their cloud offerings in this space over time.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

They run much of their cloud on AWS and Azure and Google today. You can see that in their reports.

I don’t know that Apple will be able to make enough server-grade ARM-based chips or server class hardware using their chips, to be able to make a real impact on AWS and Google and Azure. They have never really understood the server market anyway.

I do think they will be able to roll out more of their own data centers for doing some of their most sensitive data processing, and more of the stuff that they consider to be core to their business, in kind of a hybrid/hybrid cloud model, but I think they’re always going to have most of their cloud actually hosted on AWS, Google, Azure, and other cloud providers.

> Not sure how they, and not Amazon

Pure speculation, but Microsoft and Apple have long standing working relationship, in a way that Amazon just doesn't have.

Amazon and Apple do have a long and storied relationship, featuring both collusion and competition:

1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-pri...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.

3. https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079340/amazon-apple-iph...

I suppose "long" is relative.

The verge article is from 2018, the Apple v Publishers is 2013.

Apple and Microsoft have been collaborating/competing since the 70's.

Hope the NDA they referred to didn't have a clause about "not acknowledging the existence of the NDA" that many do. :D

I believe you are thinking of a NSL (National Security Letter). I've never seen an NDA that compelled secrecy regarding the agreement itself.

It is definitely a thing, and I may or may not have signed one

Maybe it's to guard against the possibility of revealing what's covered by an NDA by answering yes or no to increasingly-detailed questions about what is and isn't covered by the NDA?

Sorry I should have been more explicit. I've seen all sorts of dumb shit in NDAs. What I meant to say was I've never seen that kind of language in an NDA drafted by a decent lawyer that expected it to be enforceable.

Competent legal council would have the whole thing invalidated because you cannot mount a legal defense to a document you can't acknowledge the existence of in open court. Judges only let that stuff fly when you risk human life or judicial process, not in civil cases.

VMs on real Apple hardware isn’t a problem. Apple used VMware extensively on their internal infrastructure during the time I was a contractor for Apple Retail Software Engineering.

And Apple licenses their OS to be run under VMware on certain other hardware vendors, too. You just have to ask the right people.

Is there much mystery, I thought they were simply frozen on the os version before the license change?

I’m not familiar with GitHub Actions but if you can’t directly interact with the MacOS operating system, then wouldn’t it really be GitHub “using” the operating system, not you?

They got ARM macOS 11 VMs?

Microsoft owns a significant amount of Apple stock.

Citation?

Remember in 1997, Microsoft invested 150 million dollars into Apple to appease regulators? They sold it in 2003 for a tidy 550 million dollars. Nice return on investment!

If they didn't sell it, it would be worth approximately 130 BILLION dollars today.

Looks like you’re right, MS liquidated it a long time ago, and I mixed up Gates and MS, but if we call 5% as lowest amount of significance or how it was non voting stock it still isn’t a good point I made.

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-founder-bill-gat...

Ballmer strikes out again

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