When we were first adding Mac OS X guest support at VMware (2022)
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The technical barriers weren't the biggest headache around this in a commercial setting previously.
Because afaik, as soon as MacOS is not on Apple hardware at some level, it's not license-compliant.
^W^W and you'd be right. The only runtime requirement is Apple hardware.
The initial wording was something along the lines as "on Apple-branded hardware", creating (if you were a bit zany) the loophole of stamping an Apple sticker on any hardware and declare it Apple-branded. That was the joke in some Hackintosh circles circa Snow Leopard.
I still run some Macs at work with ESXi on it for this purpose. With version 7 because VMWare stopped supporting Mac with ESXi 8. Sadly, because Apple hasn't even stopped yet making intel versions, it's a bit early IMO.
I don't think so. No technical reasons, though, qemu runs it just fine.
Without breaking the EULA: no. For the same reason you're not allowed to install Windows on an ARM Chromebook.
Legally and without breaking the EULA: only the Darwin kernel and the various open source tools that can run on top of it.
If you've bought an OS install disk, I'm not sure how enforceable "you may only use this disk on hardware we sell" is in countries with consumer protection laws (i.e. large parts of Europe). In some jurisdictions, you would even be allowed to reverse engineer and patch any code that breaks compatibility.
If you're using a license tied to your MacBook on another machine, or pirate a copy, that's probably illegal in every way possible.
In theory you can install Lion, software you can physically buy and the last way to get a separate OSX license, install it, probably legally, and then upgrade the OS through official installers. That becomes a complex legal matter very quickly (as you often need to fake hardware IDs of real Apple devices to get through the process) as every upgrade comes with its own EULA, but it's a way forward.
However, blocking these installs is pointless anyway. We're at the point where docker run -it [...] sickcodes/docker-osx:ventura spawns a VM for you.
Lastly, as long as the software was developed on a Mac and tested with the open source kernel on other platforms, there's no legal reason why they couldn't have created an emulator. Darwin is a free kernel in almost every sense of the word and while their customers may be breaking the TOS between themselves and Apple, there's no restriction on selling software that may break the TOS if run on the wrong machine. With Macs being Intel PCs capable of running Linux and Windows, often lacking special drivers from Apple, targeting generic x64 seems like a perfectly fine solution.
> With Macs being Intel PCs capable of running Linux and Windows, often lacking special drivers from Apple, targeting generic x64 seems like a perfectly fine solution.
Of course they're quickly becoming ARM64 PCs now.
Until Microsoft sells Mac compatible Windows for ARM licences, the "you can use it in bootcamp" defense becomes a lot harder to argue.
Unfortunately, the Psystar saga says Apple can forbid running their software on unapproved hardware.
I don't think consumers acting on their own will be treated the same way, nor that VM developers that sell software that will run on legitimate Macs can be sued for possible abuse of the license on other platforms.
Furthermore, Corellium's virtual machines were deemed legal despite everything else.
Apple being Apple, if they had legal recourse for suing VMWare, they definitely would have, years ago.
Cloud providers are forced to host mac instances on real mac hardware for example (with a lot of strange restrictions).
After all, Apple is still bringing out new versions for intel.
I'm pretty sure the author is trying to mimic the VMWare logo: https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/6lqgerXP23...
Reading through their blog, the author appears to enjoy being clever with unicode.