you still legally need to run it on an actual Mac due to Apple's terms of service though... so is there really a lot gained ?
Back on topic though: it's too bad Apple doesn't allow licenses for running things headlessly like this.
You over-philosophized to the point of bringing their kitschy koan off-topic.
How I interpreted the use of the koan : Apple has no history of legally chasing those who virtualize their operating system; as this is a non-topic thusfar -- who cares?
The hammer may fall one day, but so far 'why are we worried about a legal response that doesn't seem to exist?'.
The answer, of course, is that anyone who builds product based on a legally grey area is at risk when that area begins to crumble.
>it's too bad Apple doesn't allow licenses for running things headlessly like this.
agreed, but I think Apple wants to drive everyone to a hardware solution.
At one point 'enterprise-ish' hardware was offered, but now it seems that it'd be in their interest to offer virtualization licenses while trying to smooth out whatever troubles exist between their software and the major VM hyper-visor offers out there -- mostly since there are huges holes in their hardware offerings for those seeking to do 'enterprise-ish' things en masse.
Say I have a personal project with a few dozen users. Somebody reports a bug on osx -- I don't do windows, I don't do macs, so I'd need to rely on my small community to fix it. With a pirate copy, I'd be able to do the fix -- and none would be the wiser.
Scale that up to a company, put it up on a public repo's CI, and that's when people might hear the tree fall.
When they were on rough times, everyone understood about needing to break compatibility with old hardware (that nobody really cared about anyway because, despite it's horrendous price, was super obsolete due to the rate of Moore's law back then). But nowadays, Apple is invalidating old hardware platforms for superfluous reasons, like abandoning 32-bit apps, enforcing their OEM cryptographic authority (with T2 chip) and getting into it with nVidia (granted nVidia screwed up big time with those GPU chips that blow) or more recently, getting into it with Intel (which has caused agonizing supply-chain issues for Apple). They are no longer that good about helping people support Linux either --you would think that when they deprecate a machine, they would at least have the decency to open source all of its drivers...(and have pre-negotiated the legal rights to do so).
