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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the PsyStar case, but this seems likely to be illegal.

Psystar, among other things, released "Rebel EFI" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation#Rebel_EFI), which was a way to circumvent OSX's checks that you were running on mac hardware.

Judge Alsup ruled that Rebel EFI was a circumvention technology, and thus not legal under the DMCAs anti-circumvention provisions.

The snap is not running macOS on mac hardware. Even if you run it on a mac laptop, it's using virtualized qemu hardware. It includes a magic hardware string to make macOS run (https://github.com/popey/sosumi-snap/blob/def1652e916f/snap/...). That magic string is a circumvention measure which dodges a check macOS makes on boot to see if it's on legitimate hardware, and so I think this project is performing circumvention, similar to Rebel EFI.

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The name is literally "So Sue Me".

This is no doubt a reference to the alert whistle sound on Mac OS 7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRh_-2R6juM&t=24

In sad news, I went looking for Pud's blog "Fucking Sue Me", and not only does it redirect to something unrelated, but it was explicitly excluded from the Internet Archive. I guess a new generation will have to relearn the old lessons.

https://archive.today/QHkz8

It's also a throwback to Apple, post lawsuit-with-Apple-the-record-company, introducing sound to Macs. "Sosumi" is an odd (in context) but clever and reverent homage.

I can still hear the sound when I see the word “Sosumi”

I still hear it as my default alert sound even though I’ve disabled all system sounds for years!

I now have the sudden urge to go find “wild eep” and set it as my alert sound.

Apparently Jim Reekes said he didn't remember how he obtained the original sound, but left the possibility open that it might (?) have been sampled from the game Crystal Quest.

Having just listened to a bunch of Mac OS system beeps on youtube, I wonder whether the Indigo sound was sampled from the SGI Indigo workstation.

Oh I have no idea about the sound’s origin! I just knew the legal and naming history.

IIRC, Apple explicitly allows running macOS virtualized, as long as the physical device is an Apple device: VMWare Fusion and Parallels both sell software designed to make this easy.

> as long as the physical device is an Apple device

just get yourself an apple sticker to attach to your laptop, ah for real though in most jurisdiction it can't be legally mandated (even if Apple wanted that US law applied to the whole world).

Back for my first hackintosh, I bought MacOS on CD, which came with a big Apple logo sticker. A careful reading of the EULA allowed executing MacOS on "Apple logoed hardware". Done!

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

> The snap is not running macOS on mac hardware. Even if you run it on a mac laptop, it's using virtualized qemu hardware.

Right. "Virtualized hardware", as in, you know, software. In other words, QEMU is software that runs on actual nonvirtualized hardware, in this laptop's example produced by Apple.

If you think differently, I invite you to virtualize a sailboat and than sail with it out to sea.

I suspect that somewhere along the way, the difference between virtaulized sailboats and actual sailboats will become more readily apparent... :)

You're reading of my comment is not charitable at all. I'm making the distinction specifically because of the DMCA's anti-circumvention measures, which specifically apply to circumventing digital copyright. Obviously any analogy to a sailboat is unrelated to the DMCA and unrelated to my comment.

I do agree that specific sentence of mine is poorly worded, but the point that it still requires that circumvention stands regardless of the poor wording.

I linked to the bit of the snap that I believe may constitute circumvention under the DMCA. I welcome you to actually respond to what I meant in my comment, and not with some strawman of an intentionally poor interpretation of it.

> but this seems likely to be illegal.

Lets leave that up to the courts.

Psystar (which AFAIK is the only Hackintosh effort that actually got taken down by Apple) was actually selling hardware, and thus would cut into Apple's hardware profits.

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