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Comment by ekurutepe | Hacker News Reader

Well, technically it doesn't have to be Apple hardware. They could be running hackintoshes, which would obviously be against the EULA of OSX. Another possibility is virtualization. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but I think the OSX Server EULA allows virtualization since 10.7. So setup any linux server off the shelf and virtualize OSX Server instances on it and you have your cloud building blocks.

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The Apple Software License Agreement for OS X Mountain Lion[1] is not your friend here.

…you are granted a limited, non-transferable, non-exclusive license:… (iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using OS X Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.

So development, testing, running OS X Server, and non-commercial are the legal uses.

The Mac OS Server license is more restrictive, a single copy on Apple branded hardware.

EOM

[1] http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX108.pdf

The license does allow virtualization, but only on Apple hardware running Lion or later as the host OS. So there's still no way to run OS X on commodity hardware without violating the EULA.

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