5 ms·
The 24 hours is dictated by new Big Sur EULA. https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-terms-that-pull-hosting-services-like-macstadium-out-of
by shp0ngle 6y ago
The 24 hours is dictated by new Big Sur EULA.
https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-terms-that-pull-hosting-services-like-macstadium-out-of-a-legal-gray-area/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te...
From the new EULA (not just for Amazon, paraphrased by 9to5mac):
* Apple software and hardware must be leased “in its entirety to and individual or organization”
* A lease period must be “for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours”
* Customers must now accept software agreements for all installed software of leased hardware
* All of these changes are only offered for “Permitted Developer services,” which are now spelled out for users
* Developers may now “install, use, and run additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments”
* The “lessor” such as Macstadium is fully responsible for making sure that all of these new requirements are upheld
- phendrenad2 6y agoWell, it's better than nothing!
- paultopia 6y agoBut the original post says they're not using Big Sur. The available OSes are Mojave and Catalina. Unless that term exists in those licenses too?
- nnx 6y agoWeird limitation. Hopefully Apple updates this.
- lokimedes 6y agoThey still think of themselves as a hardware firm, this restrains usage elasticity to a level where system hardware scaling is a dominant cost driver rather than system performance. Besides the inefficiencies of physical space at AWS sites, it is also a fine business for the cloud provider as it generates a less volatile usage pattern than normal. As Apple is acting as a monopolist by dictating the same terms to everyone, they further remove any competitive advantage of providing anything else.
- pjmlp 6y agoThey are mostly an hardware firm that packages a nice experience in the box. Nope, 12% of market share isn't a monopoly.
- caspper69 6y agoHow about being the only way to even build an application for 50% of the U.S. mobile market?
- pjmlp 6y ago99% of said apps are actually nothing more than CRUD Web forms, or crap games easily done with WebGL + WebAssembly, so no it isn't the only way.
- caspper69 6y agoI think you are missing the point intentionally. You can't run those apps on an Apple iPhone, but I suspect you knew this. It's ok to take the literal definition of the word monopoly and take it to its logical conclusion, I suppose. The U.S. government will not do that, however.
- fomine3 6y agoDoes this EURA works to effectively kill handy macOS CI service like CircleCI and force users to use VM rental service like this?
- Hamuko 6y agoI don't see why you couldn't run a CI server as long as you don't let the clients access the machine.
- eberkund 6y agoCircle CI does let clients access the machine IIRC you can SSH into the host if the job fails and tinker around to debug issues.
- fomine3 6y agoIt's reasonable to think running CI service is similar to just running httpd. But what divides? Anyway CI service runs Apple software like Xcode. Even httpd uses Apple's TCP stack.
- ben509 6y agoIf you ran a webserver hosting Great Cat Pictures on some Macs, for instance, your customers might pay a subscription fee to access your site, meaning they are paying for you to do processing and storage on their behalf. So that's an example that's clearly not leasing or subletting the devices. Likewise, you might read it that Circle is simply providing a service to users, and the users are paying a fee for the service. But a CI service will set up your dev account, your container image, to run your jobs. It'll even let you shell in, and it tears it all down when you're done. And it really starts to look like leasing when they also charge for time used on various hosts. (IIRC, Circle charges for this a bit obliquely as max parallelism.) If it went to court, Circle might argue the hosts can only be used within their larger CI system, that they don't guarantee a particular task will complete on a given host, and that they're not providing other requirements for virtual hosts, e.g. dedicated routing or names. And then Apple's lawyers might counter all that. So this is where I think lawyers would start digging through case law to figure out where providing a service ends and leasing begins.
- dash2 6y agoI’m pretty sure if Amazon wanted to negotiate custom terms, they’d have the clout to do so. This is an alliance between two giants.
- jedberg 6y agoI doubt Apple supports this in any way. It means that if you want to develop Mac/iPhone apps, you no longer have to buy Mac hardware. I'm surprised they aren't making this harder.
- dash2 6y agoSee below. They changed their EULA terms to allow it just now. Macstadium’s blog has the details.
- shp0ngle 6y agoThese are the new EULA terms.
- throwaway24824 6y agoApple use this themselves.
- Technically 6y agoHow has the eula been tested? It seems irrelevant to how to eat, how to shelter yourself, etc. basic human rights.
- noduerme 6y agoWow. That is insane and stupid and incredibly fucked up. I've had to rent Macs in the cloud on a rare basis to test certain latest-version Safari issues, and it's always a crap connection and a miserable experience. But is it enforceable for them to stipulate the minimum length of time of a VM lease?! That's your machine. You paid for it. If you want to rent it out to someone for 3 hours that's your prerogative. I don't see how they can possibly enforce that or how it could be legal as a seller to tell someone how to use their hardware.
- frankietaylr 6y agoDoes Apple gain anything from AWS for forcing it to rent for a minimum period of 24 hours?
- tpetry 6y agoAWS needs to buy a lot more mac machines from apple. Without the limit everybody would start a vm for a few minutes to run a ci job and stop the machine. So there is no „sharing“ of a machine within a 24 hour window if you only need the machine shortly.