Adding to the existing response: Apple has a weird attitude toward software licensing, but it’s fairly predictable and has been since the early 00s. They care about:
- Is the first party experience uncompromised? (I.e. you must escape their protections explicitly to bypass them without scrutiny)
- Are you commercializing your unauthorized usage? (I.e. hackintosh okay, hackintosh for sale not okay)
They have a few other, less predictable, principles when it comes to lower profile software like WebKit, but if you account for those you’re very unlikely to cross their legal team. macOS is free (dollars), and not because they expect to make up the dollars of investment in hardware sales, but because they correctly realized selling an OS isn’t a profit generator anymore. Even Microsoft has realized that.
As long as no one is making money on this I seriously solve Apple will care one way or another.
> but because they correctly realized selling an OS isn’t a profit generator anymore
This may be true. It may also be that they recognised that they can reduce fragmentation of their userbase, and increase control, by making updates free, and the value of that to the business may exceed the dollar value made from charging for software updates.
because they correctly realized selling an OS isn’t a profit generator anymore. Even Microsoft has realized that.
Microsoft makes $billions in revenue from Windows OS. From the laziest of web searches, I see their revenue in 2015 was $14.8b for 'the Windows PC Operating System'. Even today, I'm sure it's no loss leader.
2015 isn't 2021, and I believe you can get microsoft 10 for free now.
I know I got some microsoft os version for my virtualbox to run windows programs on arch linux (yes, I'm an arch user /meme).
IMHO, MacOS would be better off allowing devs to develop off apple products, because they'd get their dev fees, and royalties in app store from more developers making up for their china-like control of the platform.
Aside from the already pointed out 6 year gap... how much of that revenue do you figure they make from people buying windows licenses? Not OEMs. I bet it’s close to tens of thousands USD.
- Is the first party experience uncompromised? (I.e. you must escape their protections explicitly to bypass them without scrutiny)
- Are you commercializing your unauthorized usage? (I.e. hackintosh okay, hackintosh for sale not okay)
They have a few other, less predictable, principles when it comes to lower profile software like WebKit, but if you account for those you’re very unlikely to cross their legal team. macOS is free (dollars), and not because they expect to make up the dollars of investment in hardware sales, but because they correctly realized selling an OS isn’t a profit generator anymore. Even Microsoft has realized that.
As long as no one is making money on this I seriously solve Apple will care one way or another.