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Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

techradar.com

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Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#261

Post by matwood »

musicale wrote: post #52
crazygringo wrote: post #51

Can someone remind me why Apple is so anti-VM in seemingly every instance? It just seems so arbitrary and unhelpful, and I have a hard time imagining that the amount of hardware purchased it forces outweigh the benefits from making macOS/iOS better platforms for development and computation. It just seems like such an odd stance to take.

Apple is not anti-VM. It is anti VM-on-non-Apple-hardware. ;-) Presumably they have determined that lost hardware sales would offset any increased app or service sales from allowing VMs on non-Apple hardware. Though I don't actually know what platform macOS and iOS VMs run on in GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines. Edit: apparently Azure pipelines uses Mac pros. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines…

Apple almost went out of business allowing macOS to run on non-Apple hardware. I think there are still people there who have an irrational fear from that time.

From a current financial/business standpoint, Apple considers itself a hardware company that includes their custom OS with their hardware. From that angle it makes no sense to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware. Sort of like Sony being ok with the PS OS running on Xbox.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#262

Post by ojintoad »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #2

I thought they dropped the suit 2 years ago... https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/11/apple-settles-law...

You're correct. Apparently this was actually an attempt to revive it. The Bloomberg article that the TechRadar articles is based on makes that clearer:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-fails-to-revive-c...

> Apple Fails to Fully Reboot iOS Simulator Copyright Case (1)

> Apple Inc. failed to fully revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium Inc. over its software that simulates the iPhone’s iOS operating systems, letting security researchers identify flaws in the software. > The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium’s CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. > CORSEC “furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems,” a three-judge panel for the appeals court said, adding that iOS “is functional operating software that falls outside copyright’s core.”

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#263

Post by diffeomorphism »

amelius wrote: post #189
okamiueru wrote: post #179

What I want to do is not have to have a unified build system for multiple platforms and ABIs without any problem, but for some reason, to target anything apple, I have to use a physical apple machine. It's absolutely abusing market position, because it ends up being that in my profession, you end up purchasing mac computers for the whole office, because then you can target all platforms without any fuss. Not because…

Yes, and I wonder why do we have Wine to run Windows stuff on Linux, but we have no equivalent to run OSX programs on Linux ... Is nobody interested in implementing the OSX APIs on Linux?

> but we have no equivalent to run OSX programs on Linux ...

It is called darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/

> Is nobody interested in implementing the OSX APIs on Linux?

The reason for wine is that windows has a dominating market position and hence you often have to use some software that is windows-only. For OSX you might want to, but there is no such dire need.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#264

Post by matwood »

scrollaway wrote: post #123
l8rlump wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to sell hardware. I'm reminded of this every day when I can't use Apple Reminders and Calendar properly on non-Apple devices. I have an Apple phone but use a non-Apple computer. You used to be able to have a web interface to Reminders, but they changed it and now you can't add tasks in the web interface. No worries then, let's use Caldav. Hmmm, can't add a Caldav server to iCloud anymore. Ahh, we can add a…

This shit is why I use Google products on my iphone: gmail, calendar (with reminders), contacts, etc. (Paid version at that: I pay for google workspace, even for personal use) I'm not locked in to the Apple ecosystem: I can use it on my Linux desktop, or switch to an Android phone at any time.

So instead you're locked to Google. It's fine, many people are because of Gmail. Other people though would rather be locked to Apple.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#265

Post by eptcyka »

jraph wrote: post #259
eptcyka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I cared about Linux VMs, I wouldn't be running macOS as my host.

Maybe you don't, but it's common for macOS users to run Linux VMs to get shit done.

Sure, but for getting shit done, you can always use nested VMs or SSH into a real linux machine if need be. Regardless, the fact that you can run an unspecified amount of Linux VMs yet macOS VMs are limited to 2 is even more egregious. It's far cheaper to get Linux VMs anywhere than macOS VMs.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#266

Post by grishka »

okamiueru wrote: post #179

What I want to do is not have to have a unified build system for multiple platforms and ABIs without any problem, but for some reason, to target anything apple, I have to use a physical apple machine. It's absolutely abusing market position, because it ends up being that in my profession, you end up purchasing mac computers for the whole office, because then you can target all platforms without any fuss. Not because…

What's wrong with running hackintosh in a VM if you really want to build for Apple platforms without buying a Mac? Sure the days of hackintosh are numbered because of the ARM transition, but this would work for as long as macOS runs on x86.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#267

Post by matthew-wegner »

okamiueru wrote: post #179

What I want to do is not have to have a unified build system for multiple platforms and ABIs without any problem, but for some reason, to target anything apple, I have to use a physical apple machine. It's absolutely abusing market position, because it ends up being that in my profession, you end up purchasing mac computers for the whole office, because then you can target all platforms without any fuss. Not because…

You can run unmodified macOS underneath VMWare hosts. Apple even ships a VMXNET3 driver on every Mac (since they don't really have an external driver paradigm).

If you're reading this on macOS, have a look:

  /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kext

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#268

Post by heavyset_go »

grishka wrote: post #266
okamiueru wrote: post #179

What I want to do is not have to have a unified build system for multiple platforms and ABIs without any problem, but for some reason, to target anything apple, I have to use a physical apple machine. It's absolutely abusing market position, because it ends up being that in my profession, you end up purchasing mac computers for the whole office, because then you can target all platforms without any fuss. Not because…

What's wrong with running hackintosh in a VM if you really want to build for Apple platforms without buying a Mac? Sure the days of hackintosh are numbered because of the ARM transition, but this would work for as long as macOS runs on x86.

It would open your or your employer's business to liability.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#269

Post by alex0110010 »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #128
vlovich123 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. iMessage & FaceTime AFAIK are cryptographically locked onto Apple HW. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that each piece of Apple HW ships with a burned in unique private key that Apple records the public key of in it's internal database. That private key would be missing in a VM context. It's possible my data is out of date though because iMessage spam is real & I'm not sure how that's done i…

I haven’t looked at this in detail in a while either, but I don’t think the claims here are correct. It is true that Apple employs some efforts to prevent/discourage you from using those services illegitimately, but using iMessage and FaceTime from a Hackintosh has been possible for years, largely without jumping through any hoops.

As far as I am aware, you need at least one Apple Device to get it started on a Hackintosh. So you might still need one iPhone and then also receive iMessages on a Android by using a VM in the background. And this sounds so complicated, that I would doubt that more then a handful of people world wide would do it.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#270

Post by tiernano »

ayewo wrote: post #216
tiernano wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure does run on Windows. It's HyperV server below the rest of the hardware. It's a custom Windows install that you can't purchase, but it's Windows none the less.

That's interesting. Do you have a public source for this handy? I remember seeing an article [1] proclaiming that more than 50% of Azure's workloads are on Linux, so I'm guessing their hypervisors are running an optimised Linux kernel somewhat. 1: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156222

that 50% is the guests, not the hosts... I think they even have Hyper-V, along with the Windows Server Kernel, running on ARM, since they now have ARM VMs... Only a matter of time before thats released in the wild... [1][https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-virtual-machine...]
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