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Brian Stucki here. If I had the power over Apple that you think I do, I definitely would have pushed for iPhone Socks first. Joking aside, the software license

Brian Stucki here. If I had the power over Apple that you think I do, I definitely would have pushed for iPhone Socks first. 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.

lultimouomo 6y ago
I get that you're happy because Apple has now explicitly permitted what you were doing. 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.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  Why did you say he is happy that apple “doesn’t allow more stuff”?
- pbronez 6y ago
  Regulations benefit incumbents. That holds whether the regulations are national laws or corporate policies. When you make new rules, the established ecosystem adapts and doubles down while new players have a harder time getting started.
  - addicted 6y ago
    This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents. 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”.
    - kgantchev 6y ago
      > This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents. 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.
      - reaperducer 6y ago
- kgantchev 6y ago
  > 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? 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!
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Why wouldn't Apple just let people rent out computers for any amount of time, as long as they don't contain music or movies? I can understand why Apple would wan't someone to pay $3.99 to rent a movie for 48 hours, and then sub-rent that movie a couple dozen times. But why do they care about someone running CI?
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Because tens of thousands of devs working on other platforms would be able to rent a Mac for half an hour, build their cross-platform framework code as an XCode project, and then submit to the App Store, without ever touching a Mac, testing on a Mac, and so on. At least this puts a barrier to entry.
      - kgantchev 6y ago
        This one!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
saagarjha 6y ago
Hi, thanks for weighing in. I'm sure you picked up that I'm pretty mad, but I'll try to tone it down a little bit. I'm not an Amazon employee or someone who is personally harmed by this or anything, aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services. I'm mostly arguing about the principle of the thing. 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?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services 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).
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
Maybe a case can be made to eliminate the 24 hour minimum by focusing on reducing carbon emissions Why force someone to rent for a day when they need it for an hour? “This 23 hours of global warming is proudly sponsored by the Appleverse.”
- coldtea 6y ago
  Let's start by killing crypto-coin, which is basically global-warming-as-money...
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    True dat
hibbelig 6y ago
Your article sounds as if it had previously not been allowed to offer such services. Or was it a grey zone before?

lultimouomo 6y ago

I get that you're happy because Apple has now explicitly permitted what you were doing. 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.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
Why did you say he is happy that apple “doesn’t allow more stuff”?
pbronez 6y ago
Regulations benefit incumbents. That holds whether the regulations are national laws or corporate policies. When you make new rules, the established ecosystem adapts and doubles down while new players have a harder time getting started.
- addicted 6y ago
  This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents. 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”.
  - kgantchev 6y ago
    > This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents. 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.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
kgantchev 6y ago
> 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? 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!
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Why wouldn't Apple just let people rent out computers for any amount of time, as long as they don't contain music or movies? I can understand why Apple would wan't someone to pay $3.99 to rent a movie for 48 hours, and then sub-rent that movie a couple dozen times. But why do they care about someone running CI?
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Because tens of thousands of devs working on other platforms would be able to rent a Mac for half an hour, build their cross-platform framework code as an XCode project, and then submit to the App Store, without ever touching a Mac, testing on a Mac, and so on. At least this puts a barrier to entry.
    - kgantchev 6y ago
      This one!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

saagarjha 6y ago

Hi, thanks for weighing in. I'm sure you picked up that I'm pretty mad, but I'll try to tone it down a little bit. I'm not an Amazon employee or someone who is personally harmed by this or anything, aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services. I'm mostly arguing about the principle of the thing. 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?

coldtea 6y ago
>aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services 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).

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

Maybe a case can be made to eliminate the 24 hour minimum by focusing on reducing carbon emissions Why force someone to rent for a day when they need it for an hour? “This 23 hours of global warming is proudly sponsored by the Appleverse.”

coldtea 6y ago
Let's start by killing crypto-coin, which is basically global-warming-as-money...
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  True dat

hibbelig 6y ago

Your article sounds as if it had previously not been allowed to offer such services. Or was it a grey zone before?