Live data from Hacker News

Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

forums.virtualbox.org

1–10 of 35 posts

Re: Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

#3
post #2

Is Guest OS X, on VMs legal? I thought that was the against Apples terms of service. I never really found out what happened to the whole PsyStar thing.

IANAL, but as far as I understand, their EULA is sympathetic to running OS X on Apple hardware. So if you're running VirtualBox on OS X already, it might be alright with apple.

Re: Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

#4
post #2

Is Guest OS X, on VMs legal? I thought that was the against Apples terms of service. I never really found out what happened to the whole PsyStar thing.

Depends on the country, as I understand it. Some countries like Germany allow it (prohibit Apple from certain terms in the license) , while other places (USA) it would be against license terms (I won't say illegal as that implies criminality; it would be a civil violation).

Re: Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

#5
post #2

Is Guest OS X, on VMs legal? I thought that was the against Apples terms of service. I never really found out what happened to the whole PsyStar thing.

It is illegal to run OS X on a hardware not made by Apple, I guess it's fine to run it as a guest in a VM (the old Mac-on-Linux did that), although I can be wrong as well.

Re: Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

#7
post #2

Is Guest OS X, on VMs legal? I thought that was the against Apples terms of service. I never really found out what happened to the whole PsyStar thing.

You're legally only allowed to run OS X Server virtualized on Apple hardware. VMware and Parallels have both implemented checks in their products to help Apple enforce this (although I believe they're somewhat trivial to work around).

Re: Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

#9
post #5
post #2

Is Guest OS X, on VMs legal? I thought that was the against Apples terms of service. I never really found out what happened to the whole PsyStar thing.

It is illegal to run OS X on a hardware not made by Apple, I guess it's fine to run it as a guest in a VM (the old Mac-on-Linux did that), although I can be wrong as well.

It is not illegal, to my knowledge no court has ruled on the matter and the only judgment (PYSTAR) that even remotely relates to OSX on no apple hardware and it had to do with copyright violations. Copyright protects distribution and public display of the media not the use of the private use of media. Companies have tried to blur this line by expanding what copyright encompass. If they want it to be illegal they need to provide a crypto key at the hardware layer that the software communicates with, as breaking cryptography does violate several laws.

Re: Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

#10
"Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)"

Awesome. I'm definitely not a VM expert, but I think that means I can fire up my VM, and if not much is running in it, it won't consume as much memory on the host. Is that correct?

Post reply on HN