The vast majority of the time, situations are complex than internet users think they are. There are two sides to every story, &c. It's fine to make your point, but please stick to the HN rules and make it substantively and thoughtfully. The fact that rage rants get heavily upvoted makes this more important, not less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Joking aside, the software license agreement was certainly a cause for personal celebration. It might be helpful for you to compare macOS 11 to previous versions. (Linked in my post.) If I/MacStadium did anything, we showed that there was a need for this sort of service and that both Apple and developers would benefit with some official way to do it. Amazon joining is further proof of that.

I’ve always pushed for the safe road at MacStadium (and my company Macminicolo before that) even if it meant losing out on gray area business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered “but what if Apple shuts this service down?” Not anymore.

With the new Eula, the guidelines are now set. Doing everything above board paid off.

I'm less clear on why you're happy that they didn't allow more stuff, like renting by the minute or for arbitrary purposes. You seem to depict companies that were doing this as "below board", while you as "above board". This is certainly true now, but before the changes both would have been a grey area - I don't see much of a difference.

Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden?

For the record in no way I think that Apple took this decision to favor you or anyone else except themselves. It just seems that you won a regulatory lottery.

An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, without which, as you see in nearly every other state, workers are severely bound by their employment contracts in the work they can do while and after being employed by a company.

If regulations seem to benefit incumbents, it’s because incumbents exist and therefore can play a role in setting regulations. The counterbalance to this should be public pressure and political action, but incumbents recognizing that do much to dissuade the public from pushing for such action, including convincing people of pithy, but 180 degrees wrong ideas such as “regulations always benefit incumbents”.

The best cases occur where they raise a floor uniformly. For example I would prefer to add anti pollution systems to my paint factory, because I live in town too, and I just don't want to pollute. It would raise the price of my paint $1/gal, and not enough customers will chose a product just because it polluted less. Many of my competitors feel the same. If we all do it everybody benefits and nobody suffers relative to their competition. This is even more important in cases where the customer can't signal through the market, e.g. electricity generation. These can benefit incumbents but not necessarily hurt new entrants, especially when they are cap ex rather than op ex (e.g. minimum wage rather than an additional piece of equipment).

There are many bad examples as well, some of which raise a floor asymmetrically. For example FB, or at least their CEO, is willing to have the CDA's section 230 abolished because they have such a dominant customer base and enough cash that they believe they would be able to afford to do the resulting government mandated controls and fight any lawsuits, while a new entrant would not.

The intended purpose is to help the new entrants, but I don't see Microsoft or AT&T losing anything or their smaller competitors gaining anything after the regulatory action against them.

> An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, without which, as you see in nearly every other state, workers are severely bound by their employment contracts in the work they can do while and after being employed by a company.

That's a matter of negotiation. I always (successfully) negotiated with my employer to exclude my personal projects from the contract. I find that employees have a lot more negotiating power than they realize.

> If regulations seem to benefit incumbents, it’s because incumbents exist and therefore can play a role in setting regulations.

I think that's synonymous with the original statement made by OP. You're just providing another reason why it's true.

AT&T lost big. It ended up going bankrupt.

The "AT&T" you know today is not the same company. It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.

It did so because AT&T was a more valuable brand than Southwestern Bell. Looks like it worked.

> It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.

Southwestern Bell was the same subsidiary that broke off from AT&T Corporation. AT&T Inc was the merger of the companies that were originally broken up from AT&T Corporation. Here is the org chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Chart_of_AT&T_Baby_Bell...

AT&T became even bigger after the breakup: https://www.businessinsider.com/att-breakup-1982-directv-bel...

You think that AT&T Corporation going broke and selling to a company that originated from the AT&T Corporation, which later renamed itself to AT&T Inc is a good example of a government-imposed corporate breakup?! It literally divested from those companies only to have most of them merge under the same name again.

Quite a few observers, including people internal to Microsoft, felt it cost the company significant momentum at the time, and confidence after.

Before the court case, Microsoft was a brutal competitor (remember the Simpsons episode?). Not so much after.

So basically SBC was one of many companies spun off from AT&T, then it bought up several of the other Baby Bell companies spun off, too. Really, it was AT&T buying AT&T.

It worked on paper, but the victor was still from the same tree.

I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours).

And to circle back around, this EULA enables MacStadium's hardware hosting competition to enter the market... thus comes Amazon into the playing field. I just don't see how having to compete with Amazon is, all of a sudden, a better deal for MacStadium. If anything, it just highlights the volatile nature of running a business in the Apple ecosystem.

> For the record in no way I think that Apple took this decision to favor you or anyone else except themselves. It just seems that you won a regulatory lottery.

"Congratulations, you're a winner... your prize is to compete with Amazon!" Some would certainly wear it with a badge of honor!

Almosto all of MacStadium post is about those competitors, did we read something different?

And Amazon would be much more of a competition were they allowed to rent by the minute, it's their selling point!

At least this puts a barrier to entry.

Macstadium competes against other short-term rental companies but also against real Macs, Hackintoshes on physical machines, Hackintoshes on virtual machines (inc EC2), and non-consumption.

Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.

MacStadium isn't doing short-term rentals not because it can't but because the EULA doesn't allow it. Anybody doing short-term rentals is doing it on Mac hardware so they can just as easily sell long-term rentals. Aside from MacStadium being a major player in this field, I see absolutely nothing that favors them compared to their competition. In fact, it seems to have created Amazon as a competitor.

And the Hackintosh thing is the reason a Mac hosting companies exist in the first place. If Hackintoshes were allowed, there would be no companies offering Mac hosted hardware. I don't see how that's related to this particular situation tho. Apple created the need for Mac hosted hardware so blaming Mac hardware hosting companies for this is a bit backward.

> Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.

The VMs have to run on Mac hardware as well.

Anyways: I read your blog post back when it came out. Whether Apple took your input into account when making the EULA, I don't know; I am sure that you must have some sort of amicable relationship at the very least. Running services "on the border" like this is never easy, but I would think that your business model (which includes buying a huge number of Macs) has probably kept Apple mostly on your side. I know the work you've done to keep it this way and to be honest, I was happy for you when Apple announced their rack-mountable Mac Pros and gave you a mention at the Mac Mini event.

The problem from my side (at least where you and MacStadium are involved) mostly lies with the blog post you wrote. Look, I get it, Apple's changes make the EULA work for you. That's great! But I'm sure you also realize that spelling this out clearly in the way that they did means that the "gray area" becomes a black area for basically everyone else. What I didn't appreciate is you calling it a "gray area" and coming up with rationale for why what they want is not reasonable. Apple came in, almost certainly looked at your business specifically, made its rules to hurt developers and these companies, and now you're writing blog posts about how Apple is your friend and you were right all along. It feels like you've decided to start singing praises for a bully that decided to leave you alone, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's. But could you maybe not publicly celebrate that Apple has created a situation that happens to help you and make it generally worse for others? Can we stop trying to normalize or even argue that sharing a Mac is something wrong, something that Apple would think is ruining the "performance experience" you should get from a Mac?

So, you give him all this shit and you're not even using his service?

>There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's.

If we're talking for CI of builds, sure. But in that case, one wouldn't be much affected (the C in CI means continuous, so you wont just rent for a few minutes).

Otherwise, as a user, I'm quite satisfied with less developers being able to build XCode projects and submit apps without even owning a Mac to test them on. Looks like it would bring a delluge of poorly ported apps based on cross-platform APIs and only tested in non-Mac platforms (if that).

Will we get some lower quality apps, sure, do those already exist? yeah. It just sounds like gatekeeping for not much benefit.

Thanks! I try to add the ocassional low quality comment for balance :-)

>so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo.

Well, my intented meaning was more like "Don't create/sell apps for a platform you dont even own to test in".

The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about.

I think the latter would be more frequent.

If they were mere poor hobbyists guys legitimately coding for the platform, they'd own a machine, either new, or second hand, or whatever. It's when you don't code in the platform, but only want to target it for selling that you have an issue...

You can also go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you do own. Suppose the developers and testers have Macs on their desks, but you still want to have your CI run in the Cloud. Now I'm not an expert on cloud pricing so I could be wrong, but I imagine you could benefit from paying by the minute in that case, depending on the specifics of your situation (builds per day, time per build, total cost of ownership of having a build farm in house).

As for your other comments: I know what CI is; I use it daily! The way my CI runs (which is how most CI is!) is that a when a commit gets pushed a machine gets spun up to build it, then a few minutes later it shuts itself down once the compilation is complete. Why would I want to pay to have a Mac for an entire day in this scenario? I'd have to be pushing code every few minutes to have any hope of efficiently using one machine.

And believe me, I hate cross-platform garbage apps just as much as you do. But I am not in favor of putting arbitrary restrictions on how people can write their apps. Xcode used to be a soft-requirement to build apps and look how well that worked out: native developers have to stick with it all the time, even when it's acting up and being buggy, and developers who couldn't care less have reverse engineered it to the point where they either generate an Xcode project from a source tree and build from the command line, or they just package their own app bundle themselves with the magic bits that Xcode would usually apply. Trying to stop people from making garbage apps by limiting their tooling options rarely works. And, in fact, I personally know people who go services like MacStadium (VNCing in) to use Xcode for the couple days it takes to set up a build system with the right certificates and profiles, then they never touch a Mac ever again. It's the native developers with their own Macs who want to use a fresh machine to build their code for Mojave or something that they aren't running on their personal computers.

“This 23 hours of global warming is proudly sponsored by the Appleverse.”

These rules are 100% down to Apple, absolutely nothing to do with AWS and MacStadium in terms of decision-making.

Apple don't want the perceived value of their machines to become lower, want to make sure there's no possibility of performance issues due to multiple tenancy, and want to make sure this doesn't become a way for people to have a personal Mac without having a Mac.

Maybe in another year or two, assuming nothing came out of this which Apple didn't like, they might loosen the rules slightly.

It's really not Apple's business to try to protect people from "performance issues due to multiple tenancy". People who buy these things already know how this works.

And it absolutely is 100% typical of Apple to do this kind of thing. They don't want third party companies to provide offerings which might cause them problems or degrade their brand/perception.

I'm not at all saying these terms were added to benefit AWS. More that they were a condition of Apple doing this first official cloud partnership.

For example, it wasnt hard to predict that a company which basically gives away its OS for free, and nearly makes all its money selling the hardware to run the OS would start with licensing terms that led to more sales of macs.

This idea that Apple is worried about an EC2 instance replacing a personal Mac is way, way, out there. What is much more likely is that a developer buys a lower cost, not Apple laptop and uses that to connect to a Mac on EC2 for the few tasks that require a Mac. Again, it's an move _against_ developers, it's not designed to make the lives of developers any easier.

It seems unlikely that they could successfully sue me if I buy a bunch of Macs and give some people physical time-limited access (say, students in a classroom). What makes the difference? Remote access? Charging rent? I'm not sufficiently invested in these matters for a deep dive, so hoping someone with legal knowledge could chime in.

of course like with anything in the legal system it will take a company like Amazon that has their own team of $1,000/hr lawyers to face up against Apple's team of $1,000/hr lawyers in order to get a precedent setting case

Second, I wonder on what legal basis they can actually impose usage restrictions of a whole Mac (hardware+software) via an EULA as long as I don't breach any copyright (which I don't think I do if I rent out usage of the entire system for a few hours).

AFAICT (again, not a lawyer), everything rests on section 1.J.[1] "Except as expressly permitted in Section 3, you may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software." being enforceable. (Section 3. contains the infamous terms for Leasing for Permitted Developer Services with the 24hr restriction). I don't know if such terms would hold up in court. If I read the thing correctly, the the EULA forbids people from lending their MacBook to a friend, or even resell it, which strikes me as quite absurd.

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf

In a broad interpretation, the prohibitions on rent/lease/lend/sell of "the Apple Software" would apply to the whole system (harware+software), which would forbid me to sell my old Mac. This would never hold up in court. But in a narrow reading, where the prohibitions only apply to the software, separated from the hardware it does not look like there is anything stopping me from renting out (access to) the entire Mac to a single user[1], for whatever purpose and duration I want. So those 24hr and "development purposes" would be moot.

[1] There's probably more than enough precedence to uphold number-of-users restrictions of software, e.g. Windows Server CALs.

If instances are totally ephemeral in the same way as we are used to with linux vm's maybe that runs the risk of creating a real problem for apple services?

- running apps in the cloud, not for q/a, but as a farm for adclicks and fraud. People already do that - farm for generating and submitting low quality games primarily to sell ads. People already do this. - Use backup images on systems with Secure Enclave in order to crack the encryption. Someone security company whose clients are state level actors, and increasingly, law enforcement, are doing this with iphones. I don’t know if a mac cloud makes this possible for other hardware - The M1 is an Apple exclusive SoC with a lot of bespoke, specialized chips, and unified memory, and is only going to get faster for future Macs. I can see people trying to access a cloud for that, while ignoring the branding that links consumer, end-user experience with “Apple”. (Esp since Nvidia has bought ARM, and that RISC-in-cloud is becoming a big deal)

I am not saying those are a good enough reason to set the ELUA the way Apple did, but that I get why Apple might do this.

The flip side from my perspective. A monthly dedicated host on MacStadium is much cheaper than running an AWS Windows 2019 Server ondemand, or even with Reserved Instance pricing.

Why does that matter to me and the company I work for? Because Unity is behind on their Linux version, so CI builds are going to run on either Mac or Windows. I don’t really care that much about elastic compute for this, though being able to use AMIs matters more. The main reason we have not moved to using Macstadium dedicated hosts is that I would need to set up something like Chef as configuration management for what would be essentially a fleet of pet servers.

But if our team wants to deploy to either Mac or Windows as production systems ... I would be discouraging them from doing so.

> I’m happy to have an absolute guideline from Apple

Before this, it was a legal grey area. Now at least the rules are spelled out and are clear. More importantly, they are the same for everyone. I think we could all argue over what the "right" limits might be (or if there should be any), but at least MacStadium, AWS, and whomever else wants to rent out cloud-based Macs now know where they stand.

Even if MacStadium was not involved in this at all, making a blog post about a change that hurts your competitors and talking about how you are somehow better than them and deserve to exist is remarkably poor taste.

I'm pretty sure that MacStadium didn't limit their rental to one customer per hardware box out of spite for their customers, but because that's what Apple expected of them. So their were being held to a higher standard than some of their competitors, who had much higher profit margins by putting multiple customers on one machine.

So I think he is justifiably happy that Apple created a fair competition by clearly spelling out the legal rules for everyone.

The fact that Apple's official rules are close to what they were doing adds additional credibility to this interpretatio, because it suggest that they were following Apple's guidance before it became legally easy to enforce

I wouldn't put any blame for how these rules look like on MacStadium, because if Epic cannot negotiate with Apple on eye level, I'm confident that MacStadium never will. It's probably more like they received their future laws as dictated by their fruit-shaped God.

I think it could be argued that it shouldn't be Apple's place to set the rules of the competition. If MacStadium is correct, that the best experience is one-user-one-machine, then their business model should win out. It's not fair competition to rule out all other business models.

Thing is he's only happy because those rules are good for them. The way he talks about renting partial CPUs being somehow 'wrong' and makes them look like a ripoff is misleading. Just because you can get a VPS or hourly billed CPU time does not mean you can not get a full machine as well. But cost matters a lot, especially to smaller developers.

What Apple did here is create a monopoly for MacStadium, at least in the near future, and remove services like AWS from consideration completely. Brian's claims that they were simply offering their services in a way that "felt right with what Apple would have wanted" is marketing drivel. I don't care if I am getting a single core out of four, I'm not trying to browse Safari on this machine. Just run my builds and give me what I pay for; that's how CI works for literally everything else.

It's not only marketing drivel, it's a downright strange statement. I mean with which other product would you consider the wishes of the anthropomorphized business which created the product in terms of how you use it? Normally the product is meant to serve the consumer, not the other way around.

I don't see what the bit I left off ("at least in the near future") changes.

There's nothing structural that favors MacStadium over other businesses with the same model.

This is nothing like a monopoly.

It's like Netscape had a monopoly on browsers because they were the first to ship when HTTP 1.0 was finalized.

There is nothing dishonest about asking Apple about its future business plans and following Apple's rules. If you base your entire business on skirting rules then don't come crying when they are suddenly being enforced. It's on you to make your business work.

It also happens to align them with people who are in the business of selling or renting Macs, sure. But the point is not to screw AWS or MacStadium's competitors. The point is to sell Macs.

It's clear that you have never worked with Apple. This is not how Apple does business. Apple sets the terms and you either agree or GTFO.

This simply isn't true. Any business can follow Apple's licence and do exactly the same thing.

Software patents are still not recognized, let's hope this continues for a long time.

- EULAs cannot deny permissions that are allowed under consumer rights.

- It's also worth adding that software licences behave slightly differently to EULAs in that software licenses are designed to provide additional rights above what copyright laws typically allow (this is particularly true in the case of open source licenses) where as EULAs are often (though not always) designed to place restrictions on top of existing consumer rights. Hence why they're often considered invalid.

- I'm not 100% on this specific point as it has been a few years ago since I've investigated it but there was once some contention about whether it's even legal to place a licence agreement to the user after said user has already purchased the product. However companies could still use an EULA to revoke support -- much like a company can revoke warranty if they suspect the device has been opened up (eg the tamper strips). The rules here might have been clarified in court since I've last investigated this point though.

- "The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by courts, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as "computer implemented inventions"." source: https://fsfe.org/activities/swpat/swpat.en.html

- Even the FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) quote above only tells half the story regarding Software Patents within the EU. There are some restrictions on what counts as a "computer implemented invention" plus also there are also national level patent offices that override the EPO at a local level. Wikipedia has some good summaries about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...

Not saying the EULA would definitely be enforceable, just that it's not that simple in this case.

Apple obviously doesn't want companies like AWS to be renting Mac Minis as some sort of VDI solution. That's consistent with the (shitty) practices of Microsoft with respect to Windows, which confines Windows 10 hosting to Azure services.

Given the nature of Mac, an AWS MacOS service is unique in that it's very clear who the manufacturer of the underlying hardware is. Apple, given it's control-freak nature wanted to have a model that accommodated both their needs and the provided a clear, multi-provider model to do what developers need.

Windows 10 hosting is not confined to azure services, you can even bring your own license to AWS, or host your own terminal services, or run your own virtual apps, or literally anything.

If you do BYOL of Windows 10 on a non-Azure cloud service, you need to meet specific Microsoft EA requirements, and you must run on dedicated hardware. If you look at the AWS BYOL model for Workspaces, it very similar in cost to the Apple on AWS model. (https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing)

That post exudes happiness at the guidelines, like an oil company that just got a regulation passed banning solar energy. I understand the happiness at finally getting validation that Apple is alright with this business model, but that's separate from exuding happiness at the terms of that validation.

AWS is offering dedicated bare metal Mac Minis for rent with virtual NICs and virtual storage powered by AWS Nitro, there is no macOS virtualisation.

GitHub Actions, Semaphore CI, CircleCI, Bitrise, they have all done actual virtualisation of macOS for a number of years too. Yes it's a slightly more specialised problem domain, but nothing about this is correct.

No, it hasn't. If you're using "VM" to include bare metal, then you are using the wrong term for something. The definition of the word "virtualization" has not changed.

The new instance name is “mac1.metal” just like AWS’ other hardware as a service offerings:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-i...

That makes no sense, sorry.

> (...)

> either going to have to buy Macs

Why not ditch the entire Apple ecosystem while you still can? Show them that we, developers, don't like feudal lords that like to tell us what we can and cannot do with our systems. So others won't dare to copy them.

If you were able to run a business that was fun, that made you money, and that enabled you to help other people have fun and make money (i.e., your employees), would you not do that out of principle? I'm genuinely asking.

That's very shortsighted. You can make money without Apple. And by doing so, you show that you value open, generic compute systems. Also, the prosperity of your business won't be at the whim of Apple.

All businesses have constraints. In this business, you're subject to the Apple EULA. In others, you're subject to government regulation or pricing pressure due to commoditization. That's not short-sighted — no industry is forever, and there's money to be made now. Why not deploy their expertise toward financial success (and, presumably, fun)? There's demand for these services — someone's going to fill it.

For folks who don't value 'open, generic compute systems' over 'putting food on the table', the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem is just the reality they need to deal with. They're not making a moral tradeoff, just a practical one.

Are you suggesting MacStadium and co should shut down their businesses out of principle? Will you employ them once they do? Where will their customers go?

I'm just saying that as Apple gets more power this may get worse, hence the shortsightedness remark.

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf

Under: "Leasing for Permitted Developer Services"

Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.

Make of it what you will.

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSCatalina.pdf