Linux 1, MacOS 0 (illegal gcc download for minors)

Marc Lanctot lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Fri Mar 6 09:15:38 UTC 2009


I just bought my macbook I'd talked about before and just went through a 
striking experience that I figure you may all appreciate. Sorry in 
advance if this is already well-known, but it's news to me.

Darwinports is FreeBSD's ports for Mac (think portage on emerge), so it 
needs gcc to build things you download. I was surprised -- not outright 
shocked because I didn't expect it to be developer-friendly -- not to 
find gcc installed already. So, I tried fink, it gave me a weird error 
when trying to install gcc42, something about dependencies with 
unrestricted packages then I told it to install gcc-4.0 which told me to 
go download xcode to get gcc. Some googling also pointed me to xcode to 
get gcc. Even the gcc download page doesn't have binaries for MacOS.

To download xcode you need to register an account the the Apple 
Developer Connection. No free compiling for me unless I OK it with 
Apple. It's a conspiracy.. but, I said, fine, in my attempt to become a 
Mac user I'll suck up and give in to this. It's part of the experience, 
right? So getting this account just to get xcode has your home address 
as a required field. So now, using gcc on my Mac means Apple has to be 
able to track me down to my home. In case I'm hand-crafting viruses or 
something? Ok, so whatever, at this point it's a bit much but I comply 
anyway.

At the end of the account creation process, part of the agreement says 
"I confirm that I'm 18 years of age or older." Luckily I am, but this 
put me over. If I was 16 years old making some hard-earned money, went 
out and bought a Mac .. it would not be legal for me to run gcc on it. 
Actually, it would be as long as my parents or older siblings downloaded 
it for me.

Does anybody know of a way around this, or is it really illegal to 
download xcode on MacOS if you're under 18?

(Note: some sites says it comes on the CD with your MacOS disks but I 
got no such disks... but as long as these disks are provided for free 
then it should be OK...)

I'm steps closer to dual-booting this thing with Linux.....

Marc

-- 
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
   -- Albert Einstein
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