Is Hackintosh now a prohibited topic?

[BarkingGhostar]

In responding to someone's original post, I and another suggested that it can be done outside the usual retail experience. My colorful metaphor got my post censored, but then the thread got locked. Have things changed, though, on the ability to talk about Hackintosh activities?

I just need clarification as I expect others do, too. Maybe I missed something during the several weeks leading up to the holidays but I asked to be sure.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Should ask this in the mod section. My guess is hackingtoshing isn't verboten (there are lots of threads about it) but software piracy (operating outside the typical retail experience) definitely is.

 

[Kaido]

Not that I'm aware of...we have huge Hackintosh threads going back to 2008 here. The most current one (established 2013) is still stickied over in the Apple sub-forum.

The legal issue is complicated, moreso now that Apple is offering the OS for free. Before you could simply buy it, and as a private end user who wasn't selling anything to anyone & who had purchased and personally owned the software, you could then do with it what you wanted. Now that it's free & supposedly expressly for use on Apple hardware, I dunno. But on the flip side, they use parts of BSD, UNIX, and other systems that require them to have a free version available. I'm not sure if that's limited to the XNU kernel, which has roots in FreeBSD, or what, since it's been so long since I've looked at it.

Historically-speaking, the only time Apple has ever gone after anyone in the history of Hackintoshing is when Pystar tried selling pre-made Hackintoshes for a profit. Tonymac, who makes free software that makes building your own Hackintosh completely painless, has skirted that issue by offering the tools to make it happen, but not actually doing it for you. Same with EFI-X chips & Quo motherboards...they enable OOTB support, but neither actually sells you a computer loaded up with OSX.

TL;DR - outside of selling Hackintosh commercially, it still seems to be OK to do (at your own risk).

 

[JackMDS]

Controversial Topics are OK to discuss but not to link, or give actual Instructions.

The Closed thread started to Deteriorated when one of the posters provided direct links to Mackintoshes, and a "food fight". started there after.

To give a concrete example - Pirating software in general can be discussed but at the moment that some one links to a Pirate Download site, or give instructions to Hacking of software, it becomes against policy.