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Speculative question: Are open source licenses legal in the EU, or are they also illegal? Seems to me that if one is illegal, all must be. (Go ahead, mod me down, but I can't find anything on Google supporting or refuting this, so have to ask. And please cite sources).

Apples and oranges, as it were. EULA's generally attempt to control how software is used, wheras OSS licenses generally attempt to control how software is distributed only and assert no control over how an individual uses it.

OSS licenses rely on the power of existing copyright law, which already deals with distribution, and at the very least the GPL, for one, has been found legally valid within the EU.

The problem with EULA's is two-fold: In many cases they are trying to enforce restrictions against privileges users may already have by law within their jurisdiction (ie. the ability to reverse-engineer, fair-use provisions for copying media, etc.) which would generally invalidate those provisions, and the second problem is the question of enforcing click-through or break-the-seal as a valid form of contractual agreement.

So EULA's are not necessarily illegal per se, but often the provisions they try to enforce or the manner in which users are forced to accept the terms, are.

They are not only legal, but nowadays in Europe they are virtually mandatory.

Why should we mod you down? I think it is a good question.

I guess I can answer that to some degree.
The GPL and other open source "licenses" can be interpreted in terms of copyright. You have the copyright of a product and allow others to reproduce it under certain rules. That is perfectly legal in terms of copyright. You are not restricted in using the software, though.

EULAs generally restrict you in using the software you bought. They try to be some kind of contract. And such kinds of "contracts" are void here.

Yet you don't need contracts to have your copyright. You only need to create/publish (depending on national law) something.

Please correct me if I was wrong.

An EULA and a copyright license are two very different things. The first one governs how a work may be used, the latter governs how it may be copied. Copyright licenses have a very established legal foundation. EULAs have no such thing.

Lots of correct answers have already been made and I don't want to repeat them. I want just add a video of a speech held by law professor Eben Moglen held in Harvard. It's very interesting if you are interested in this topic.
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=6345039926759549406

An EULA is not a license, but a License Agreement. The GPL is not a license agreement, but merely a License. There's a catch here. Besides that the GPL does not restrict usage in anyway. It only kicks in when distributing.

The Apple EULA (and the MS ditto) is not illegal as such, but it is none the less mostly void in most european countries, since it restricts rights that cannot be restricted according to law. Not even voluntarily.

Even if that were the case, the DMCA is most certainly legal and it has stood up in court, as is the case here. Besides, Apple would be complete idiots to allow OS X on other platforms and damage their hardware sales in the process.

Correction: the legality of the DMCA as a whole is not known. No DMCA case has ever gone before a court - all have been settled out of court. A lot of people, included the MPAA, have indicated that they have their doubts about it's constitutionality; but so long as it never goes to court, it's an effective tool for those that invoke it.

Commercial vendors and professional use of virtualized osx will never move forward unless it is santtioned.

Look what they did to the thinksecret.com guy. They closed down his website and he was just spreading rumors.

a Hackintosh vs a natural install. The first is fine for the hobbiest at home but the later opens osX up to non-geekdom and developer/business uses where using a hack to get it working would not be acceptable.

I love's me a good clean hack but I can see the advantage in an official release with the hardware DRM removed.

Eulas very commonly are lawful. There is nothing in EU law that makes them unenforceable. It depends on the provisions they contain.

There are two or three things they cannot do, not because they are Eulas, but because no contract which is a condition of sale which tries to do that will be lawful in the EU. Not even if you personally read and sign it before you open the package.

The first thing is, no post sales restrictions on use of a purchased product will be valid. Once you have bought it, you can do what you like with it, within the laws of the land. So, Apple does not have to sell copies of OSX by itself. But having done so, it cannot tell you what to run it on. And it cannot get around this by pretending that though you have walked out the shop with a CD and no further payment obligations, you have in fact leased or licensed it and not bought it. It is a purchase. The reason for this is very simple: if a car manufacturer could impose post sales restrictions on use, it would, and would force you to buy parts only from it. If a tool supplier could do it, it could make you buy the pro versions before you could legally use them in way of trade. Etc.

This is one thing. The second thing is it cannot force you to lower your statutory rights under consumer protection and trade law in consideration of selling to you. So whatever your rights are about warranty, return and so on, you still have them, no matter what the Eula or any other agreement says.

The conclusion of this is very simple. If OSX really does run unmodified under KQEMU, there is nothing Apple can do to stop anyone running a purchased copy of it that way. Nothing.

The same thing applies to running MS Office under Wine. It makes no difference what any purchase agreement says, MS cannot stop you running one lawfully purchased copy of Office under Wine. Or any other emulator.

As the last example shows, before getting too enthusiastically convinced that Apple should be able to stop you running OSX on any other hardware, think about the implications a bit. To do it, you'd have to give similar rights to all sorts of other people for whom you might feel rather less enthusiasm....