gdjacobs wrote on 2020-05-11, 06:01:Complex subject! Warning: the following doesn't in any way constitute legal advice or a professional legal opinion. […]
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Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-11, 05:13:
No. Virtualization of macOS is not illegal.
Complex subject! Warning: the following doesn't in any way constitute legal advice or a professional legal opinion.
- Breaking macOS copy protection mechanisms may be in violation of DMCA, your local equivalent, and related law.
- Running macOS is, I believe, in violation of Apple's TOS when not in combination with Apple hardware. This has been the case since they shut down the Mac clone market after Scully was shoved out the door.
- Breaking copy protection may be allowed in certain circumstances (for software preservation purposes, for interoperability, for education and experimentation, when you own a legitimate copy, etc.) depending on your local jurisdiction.
- Some elements of the TOS or EULA may be unenforceable if superseded by your local jurisdiction.
Eh, several things -
a) Scully was shown the door in 1994 - the Apple CEO who made the decision to open up clones was Michael Spindler (who was also responsible for the failure of MacOS 8 Copland). He also made the entire Apple product line much more complex than before (in a silly attempt to market segment) and Apple got eaten alive by the clones (who did better machines cheaper). He was...not viewed positively in Apple folklore.
b) Yeah, of course doing it violates the DMCA and the EULA and all the legalese. At the end of the day you still have a small but vocal community who is willing to chance that, much like abandonware and/or console emulaton. You might even make the argument that the hackintosh community kept interest in Darwin alive (most of the tips and tricks Hackintosh folks used to keep ahead of Apple were derived from leveraging Darwin knowhow). I don't condone it, but I am not going to pretend it doesn't exist OR not acknowledge its place in the MacOS userbase...I ran legit Macs since 2001 but I messed with Hackintoshes in my past. Of course, I am also a loyal Macintosh customer and made large purchasing decisions on Apple hardware in my last 4 gigs
c) While Apple can in theory take a very strong tack against Hackintoshers, they very rarely do so since the Streisand effect will probably hurt Apple more than pretending that a few geeks who run Apple on non-Apple hardware doesn't exist. The ones who got the Apple lawyers on their butts were the ones actively profiting off the entire endeavor (psystar being a good example, but if you try to sell Hackintoshes on evilBay you will eventually get busted). Chances are, if you like MacOS enough to keep it around, you'll eventually pick up a Mac (a used one from 2009-2015 is a fairly good value as a tinker toy) and not deal with the headaches associated with running Hackintoshes. This is also not the first time a bunch of hobbyists skirt the lines of legality with a commerical *ix based OS...just look at Juniper's JunOS. You can easily take a FreeBSD 10 VM, run the JunOS installer on top (provided that you unpack it and modify the install script) and get yourself a JunOS Olive just to learn the ins-and-outs. Are you supposed to do it? No...Does Juniper know about it? Yes...But they turn a blind eye because they prefer a user community messing with their OS and building goodwill (plus those people move up the career chain and view Juniper more positively). The same also happens with Arista's Linux based EOS.
d) Speaking of headaches, Hackintoshes are often not worth the hassle. You'll need to source the right set of hardware that mimics (as closely as possible) a Mac equivalent, you'll need to load the right combinaion of kexts (that's kernel extensions, or drivers), mess with the installer ISO, and deal with a virtual Apple SMC (Apple system management controller is a chip that is found on Apple hardware and needs to be emulated on hackintoshes). And every time you see Apple publish an update it's a gamble on whether the update will add or change something that will break your Hackintoshes (or with the recent slip in Apple software quality...your actual legit Macs), often in ways you cannot anticipate. Even virtualized MacOS in VMWare was a pain - it's definitely 100% legal on Apple hardware and you don't even need to use MacOS as the underlying hypervisor host (XServes and MacMinis can run VMWare Fusion/Parallels/VirtualBox/Qemu, Linux+KVM or VMWare ESXi up to version 7, MacBooks and MacPro/iMacs can run KVM/VMWare Fusion/Parallels/VirtualBox/Qemu), but not everything will work. There's no such thing as metal/OpenGL support for virtualized MacOS, so apps requiring it will not work correctly. You could also unlock VMWare so the virtualized mac will work on non-Apple hardware, but eeeeeh same headaches, no real resolution. My take is that there are no free way of running MacOS (PureDarwin/OpenDarwin doesn't count) short of stealing it, but if you are a career sysadmin (like me), chances are, you touched a little bit of everything, and somewhere in your hardware pile is at least one Powerbook 0r MacBook. I have way more than one.