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Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by zamadatix on Thursday December 02, 2021 @12:23PM (#29419212)
These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.
Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by rektide on Thursday December 02, 2021 @12:39PM (#29419488)
I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that.

Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all ok? This seems so fundamentally screwy to me. Questions like how Apple is allowed to ban other browsers[1] show related type of confusion over the vast ecosystem control that seems to be spreading, but there at least there's some cloudy App Store Apple clearly retains some rights of control over.

First-sale rights in America is fairly narrow in what they permit, but in America at least, there's very much been an idea that consumers become owners of the things they buy. It feels like a modern regression that there have been so many asterisks added to this straightforward & obvious right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419825

Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by thuccess129 on Thursday December 02, 2021 @03:12PM (#29421810)
> Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage?

The leadership sitting on a board with a mandatory retirement age at 65 who is 64 will lobby all involved to change that rule to keep going to 70. The terms are negotiable. You would have to think in our time of climate crisis that using 7 or 8 hours of a 24 hour slot and wasting all that energy for 16 hours is not something the law firm that negotiated the terms would be embarrassed by. To make it right, a regulator could force Apple to limit the rental minimum slot time according a labor board's idea of a programming work day at 7 to 16 hours and not 24. Write a letter and email your politician?

Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by messe on Thursday December 02, 2021 @02:17PM (#29421039)
> I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that.

As far as I understand it, those EULA agreements aren't enforceable in the EU.

That being said, NVIDIA don't have any obligation to sell to you in bulk if they find out you're installing consumer GPUs in a datacenter, so there's obviously an incentive to follow them.

Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by R0b0t1 on Thursday December 02, 2021 @03:29PM (#29422049)
I don't think they're enforceable in the US either. Once you have it you have it. This is what a sale legally is, it terminates the rights of the former owner. They can refuse to sell to you if they think you'll do something with it, but if you get it from them by lying or from a second hand sale they can't do anything.

For software you can also have person A buy something, then give it to person B who didn't click a license agreement. But this isn't really necessary -- the case where Microsoft got slapped for motherboard locking Windows XP and had to undo it shows that if software is integral to the operation of a device rights to its use are transferred along with the sale of the item, much to the chagrin of CNC companies everywhere who have yet to be challenged on this.

It's relatively common for companies to use shell companies or employees to buy hardware off the record for investigative purposes. Place I used to work at would investigate buyers for this reason (difference being we really did give our customers free reign with the equipment, we just had to try to stop fraud and other things).

Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by Spivak on Thursday December 02, 2021 @08:37PM (#29425576)
You run around this by designing your hardware to only work with your provided software and require the user accept the T&C. If they find out your violating it they can terminate your license and, effectively, make your chips bricks.

You are legally allowed to reverse engineer them and provide your own software but Nvidia pretty much buys whole departments at universities to have the bleeding edge of hardware obfuscation. The stuff they do to make the chips inscrutable is absolutely bonkers.

Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by R0b0t1 on Thursday December 02, 2021 @09:21PM (#29425900)
This is what the MS case was about with mobo locking. Refuse to run if they think you violated license. No, they can not do that. It just needs to be enforced.
Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by wmil on Friday December 03, 2021 @01:20AM (#29427183)
Also they can easily claim that consumer cards aren't specced for 24/7 loads, thus installing in servers voids the warranty.
Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by qaq on Thursday December 02, 2021 @02:12PM (#29420974)
The term I would imagine applies to software not to the hardware
Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by moondev on Thursday December 02, 2021 @07:37PM (#29425129)
I run VMware esxi on my Mac mini with 64G of memory to create plenty of macos and Linux vms. Are you saying this is against the TOS?
Re:Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances by notinty on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:13AM (#29427754)
AIUI there's no EULA problems virtualizing macOS on Mac hardware.

This is about a minimum 24-hour rental of Mac Minis tho.