Hi, folks,
I did my research on this before pulling the trigger. I've learnt my lesson when it comes to jumping guns. That doesn't mean I'll never slip again, but it does mean I'm more careful than some of you folks would like to think.
This wasn't petty. It was well considered. I'd have done the same for anyone else doing the same. It is not personally motivated either.
To be clear: MacOS is free to use under certain conditions, but from the research I performed, those conditions do not include a VM on a windows machine. If it was just "Hey guys, this is the new link to MacOS" or whatever, fine. But the tool was meant specifically to get around Apple not wanting you to use their software in this fashion, and it was being spread with an "Apple is a huge company, so they're not gonna care" mentality. Those are pretty big red flags, and I think I was more than justified in what I did.
Also, please bear in mind that I was one of the folks advocating for CP to stop being allowed here because of the literally hundreds of illegal assets it contains. I like the concepts, I think it's a hell of a project combination and I'm glad it's free (if it was paid, we really would have to remove it from the site, for obvious reasons), but piracy is piracy. I've been hoping folks would do the right thing and update the sounds and music for literally years now, and no one's doing it. I like this hypocrisy as little as the rest of you, and I haven't played CP much at all in the last year and a half or so precisely because I don't like being hypocritical.
Rule 3 was written precisely to deal with just this sort of behaviour. If all you do in general is discuss that using MacOS on a Windows VM is possible, or slowing down your game or whatnot, that's not really breaking rule 3, as you're not trying to get others to do it, and you're not trying to legitimize it. Simter clearly was trying to legitimize something that Apple, the proprietary company in question, doesn't want you to do. If you've downloaded this software, using it implies that you're going to agree to the rules governing its use. If you can't do that, or don't want to, then stop using the product, or be more careful of what you read. Ignorance under the law is not an excuse.
Was this an enormous, earth-shattering, forum-destroying deal? No, it wasn't. But it was big enough that there was really no reason to either leave the link up or leave the thread unlocked.
Simter was trying to get around Apple's terms of service on this forum. That amounts to a form of piracy, admittedly not as blatant or dangerous as some, and probably quite benign in the hands of most people. I stand by my decision on this.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1