> you'll be in violation if you run it on a Thursday

Indeed, there is a JS library opensourced by Microsoft to decode Excel files, named xlsx.js. In the license, it is written... that it cannot run on another OS than Windows. It means even though it's Javascript, the page hosting it cannot be viewed on a Mac or Linux.

Long story short, Stuart Knightley created a clean room implementation named js-xlsx to do the same thing, without the lawyer string attached.

https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8

Thanks for the mention but I only created JSZip[0], the library that powers the zip/unzip of js-xlsx[1], but not js-xlsx itself!

[0] https://github.com/Stuk/jszip [1] https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx

This is correct, and a huge impetus for our use of Apple hardware. We simply cannot risk our business on saving some money at the expense of violating Apple's EULA.

> We simply cannot risk our business on saving some money at the expense of violating Apple's EULA.

I believe people are questioning that Apple hardware/software is a requirement of your business (and that it's not "some money", but a lot of money you'd be saving).

It's difficult to fathom Apple hardware/software being a hard requirement to operate any business (as-in you can't operate without it). Both Windows and Linux have a plethora of image utilities, audio, etc...

Sure, OSX might have some optimized image processing stuff, but couldn't the massive savings be used to scale wider with more generic hardware and still come out ahead?

Not at the moment. The cost overhead to OS X is minimized by my approach to datacenter design and operation, and the benefit of OS X's image processing software stack is maximized by the imaging engineers on staff at imgix who are making the most of it.

The math may not work out this way forever, and when it doesn't, we'll make a change.

Apple gave up on the server market. They don't care about number-crunching or scientific computing. To build a server-side based business around OS X doesn't make sense to me. Did you try writing your image processing code for Linux and CUDA / OpenCL? Is there anything specific about the OS X frameworks which means you can't develop a non-OS X solution?

Depends on where you live. At least in Germany (and I think the whole EU), EULAs are meaningless.

I can't find that for EULA's proper (would surprise me, too, as that would allow anyone to pirate any shrink-wrapped software), but EULAs cannot prohibit selling your license: that was upheld for software bought by download, too: http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012...:

"Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy"

You can even buy the right to download future updates:

"Therefore the new acquirer of the user licence, such as a customer of UsedSoft, may, as a lawful acquirer of the corrected and updated copy of the computer program concerned, download that copy from the copyright holder’s website."

Afaik, if the EULA is only shown after the sale has already taken place, it is basically meaningless around here. But IANAL and only relaying what I heard on the internet.

The lawyer I spoke to was Dutch. There is some unclarity about EULA's sold to consumers, I think the general idea of the consumer protection is that the consumer should have seen the EULA before they paid for the product.

That said, it says on the box that the software is only for Apple hardware, and I think even only as an upgrade for an existing OSX install.

If you're a company, then EULAs are definitely binding, no matter where you are.

Although this depends on the country. If Apple says that you can't run your Mac Pro on Thursday, it would probably break some Australia Consumer Law.

Although the "Only run on Apple Hardware" would probably be fine.

Even if that were not the case, I doubt the performance of the OS X image pipeline is tuned for non-Apple hardware if it supports it at all.

Non-Apple hardware does not differ in any meaningful way from Apple hardware. The performance of anything in OSX is perfectly tuned for any generic desktop computer. It also supports most hardware straight from the box.

> any generic desktop computer

Any generic desktop computer with the same hardware. It sounds like they're using Apple's image pipeline, which I imagine would be designed around the specific graphics hardware in the Mac Pro. Sure it could work on other hardware, but when you know exactly the hardware you're running on you can do a lot of low-level optimizations you couldn't otherwise do.

Apple supports Intel, AMD, and NVidia GPUs. Their graphics pipeline has over the years supported substantially all of the graphics chips produced by those vendors in the past 10-15 years. Their current full feature set may only be supported on GPUs that admit an OpenCL implementation, but that's still every bit as broad as the generic desktop computer GPU market—about two microarchitecture per vendor. Apple's not getting any optimization benefits from a narrow pool of hardware, for GPUs or anything else. The only benefit they get along the lines of narrow hardware support is that they don't have to deal with all the various motherboard firmware bugs from dozens of OEMs.

The GPUs aren't made by Apple, and I assume that is what this code is using (because otherwise it's a huge waste of money.)

which hardware is "Apple"?

The small subset of third party hardware that they ship, and optimise for?