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Comment by mcdow | Hacker News Reader

from the faq: > Is this... legally sketchy? No. Consider projects like ReactOS, a from-scratch effort to create an OS compatible with Microsoft Windows, GNUstep, which provides an open implementation of Cocoa APIs and other things, or Darling, a compatibility layer for running Darwin (macOS) binaries on Linux. ravynOS is similar and stands on the shoulders of many such projects.

as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.

but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.

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Wine and Proton are more popular than all of these examples combined and even have corporate sponsors, yet Microsoft hasn’t tried to stop them.

can’t speak for Proton, but it’s no wonder Windows doesn’t see Wine as a threat. because Wine sucks to run. any normal person would just run Windows instead of having to fool with Wine. it’s for us hobbyists, because we don’t mind a little pain.

Wine is an integral part of Proton, so they do see it as a threat.

Proton provides a better Windows runtime than Windows itself nowadays. Many games using legacy DirectX versions run perfectly fine on Linux, but need patches on Windows 11.

I think the core of this is google vs oracle case. I think they'll be in the clear unless they hit some specific (design?) patents.

I think the better example is actually GNU, which endured several challenges as a clean room implementation of unix. I think this is legally sound, but IANAL.

It's safe, worked from previously apple owned darwin oss, opendarwin and mklinux, also apple provided mostly of base OS under OSS license/APSL.

Microsoft definitely know about ReactOS.

not saying $TECHCO doesn’t know about X project. i’m just saying that if the average person doesn’t know about it, it’s unlikely to get shut down, as it poses no threat.

Maybe. But Microsoft get the bulk of their licensing from enterprise offerings. And Windows comes preinstalled on consumer machines anyway. So I don’t think there’s any risk of ReactOS becoming a problem for MS.

And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not.

Platforms like Linux was always a greater threat to both companies because Linux takes potential customers away from Microsoft and Apples ecosystems in ways that FOSS reimplementations do not.

But that all said, companies of that scale are inherently greedy and paranoid. So I wouldn’t be surprised to them burying those projects under a mountain of frivolous legal demands if those projects were to become as widely known as Linux.

You may be broadly correct, but “macOS has always been free” is definitely not true: all the Big Cat releases of Mac OS X were paid-for, right up until MacOS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” released in 2012. Only later, from Mavericks in 2013 onwards, were upgrades free. And further back in time I remember buying a software update for my first-generation iPod Touch up to par with the first-generation iPhone way back in 2008. Apple still sells or provides subscriptions to a lot of software (Final Cut Pro, Logic, et cetera) and back in the day I paid a lot of money for some of their more niche offerings Xsan, for example, which I remember cost me an eye-watering thousand bucks per node. Xgrid on the other hand was free, and it’s extremely unfortunate they killed it because in this day and age of Thunderbolt-interconnected Mac Studios with unified memory architectures running AI workloads “here’s a bunch of Macs regard them as a unified computing resource” would be extremely useful (but I digress from the digression).

Logic, Final Cut, Xcode etc aren’t really the same thing because they’re applications rather than the OS (which we were talking about).

But i didn’t realise Apple used to charge for OS upgrades. So thanks for the correction there.

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