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Comment by NoSorryCannot | Hacker News Reader

Characterizing macOS as something Apple intends to distribute as free is mostly false. They intend to charge for it with the purchase of a Mac.

Microsoft also distributes Windows "for free" on their website and if you care not at all about license terms as we evidently don't when it comes to Mac OS, then it presents no moral quandary to disable its activation annoyances. Is Windows free?

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There is no license that can be purchased for MacOS. It literally has no cost in any circumstance. This is just tortured sophistry to arrive at the tremendous conclusion that Windows does, and sometimes doesn’t, cost money. Is windows free? "Sometimes!"

It's not tortured, it's strictly the only supported and legal way of running it. Anything else is software piracy.

If that is the criteria for calling software free, then it's not a useful label.

Every legal macOS installation has been paid for with money.

>It literally has no cost in any circumstance.

Correction: It has no cost for Mac buyers. Those are the circumstances.

You're intentionally stepping around my arguments. Sure, it has no cost for Mac owners, but the ISO is free to download, and Hackintoshes are very much a thing. Again: if we use your definition, then anything requiring paid hardware cannot, by definition, be free. Which is absurd to suggest. No one I've met claims that free macOS exclusive software isn't actually free. Why is the OS any different.

Violating the EULA that Apple makes you agree to during install (by making a Hackintosh), while a tortuous action, is not necessarily illegal, and it doesn't cost money.

>but the [MacOS] ISO is free to download

Where please?

https://github.com/corpnewt/gibMacOS

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