Comment by rav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rav | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Note that `sold` is still free-as-in-£ for use in CI/CD

The relevant part of the EULA [1] states:

> Individuals who use the Software only occasionally, or non-interactive use of the Software that is not explicitly invoked by an individual such as CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), are not considered Active Interactive-use Users ("AIUs"). No additional fees are required for such uses.

I had to read it multiple times to understand the CI/CD bit. It's not clear to me whether the EULA says that CI/CD is an example of "use that is explicitly invoked by an individual" or if it's an example of "non-interactive use that is not explicitly invoked by an individual" - the wording is unclear to me and can have either of the opposite interpretations.

At my day job, we occasionally test C++ code changes by compiling in a CI/CD system to obtain a container image that we can push into a staging environment. This means we have a develop-compile-test cycle where the "compile" step involves pushing to a merge request branch, waiting for CI/CD to finish, and then running a deploy script to push out the newly-built image for testing. I wonder if this would be considered "Active Interactive-use Use" or not.

[1] https://github.com/bluewhalesystems/sold/blob/main/LICENSE.m...

> It's not clear to me whether the EULA says that CI/CD is an example of "use that is explicitly invoked by an individual"

I agree that it’s hard to interpret, but isn’t the whole point of CI/CD that developers don’t start builds explicitly? For example, your example doesn’t mention it. You push to a branch, then wait for the build to finish, but never explicitly start it.

So, it seems they want to allow free use in CI/CD setups. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other ways to implicitly invoke the linker. Your typical IDE may already do that when you click “Run” instead of “Build”. I can easily see a lawyer argue that running make qualifies as explicit invocation, too.

If we negate the wording in the EULA:

> non-interactive use of the Software that is not explicitly invoked by an individual

...then we get "use of the Software that is interactive or explicitly invoked by an individual".

I would say that running make to run sold to run/test/ship an executable, or clicking "Run" to invoke sold and test the app, or pushing a branch to run CI that runs sold to obtain an executable to run/test/ship, all easily should be considered to be AIU - after all, in all cases it's a person clicking a button (or typing a command), waiting for it to run, and then doing something with the result.

CI/CD setups are usually done on server farms, not on developer workstations. How many CI/CD setups are running on Macs? I'm guessing not many.

Many things that target macOS and everything that targets iOS will have a CI running on macOS.

For better or worse, iOS is not a niche target.

Interesting; they don't have a way to cross-compile? MacOS isn't really known for being a server OS...

No. And it's very intentional. You're not even legally allowed to run macOS VMs on non Apple hardware.

What's far worse than macOS not being a server OS is the hardware you're forced to contend with. Apple makes no server hardware. You end up with a disgusting hodgepodge of vendors making offerings that are largely redundancy in the way of massive falovers of mac minis. It's very unfortunate and makes self hosting or specifically (hardware or otherwise) needs extremely difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com