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FOSS developers should simply stop developing good software for Apple devices. The absolute opacity of Apple's technical policies and their arrogant i-dont-car

FOSS developers should simply stop developing good software for Apple devices. The absolute opacity of Apple's technical policies and their arrogant i-dont-care/its-your-problem approach against developers are quite renewed in the community. This ends up costing a lot of development time to developers who mostly work for free, who struggle to reverse engineer or debug what happens on MacOS/iOS, and (like Wireguard's case shows) it harms the reputation of their software because people tend to blame the application rather than the OS when things don't work as intended. If people want to use FOSS software, then they should be able to do so on systems that support the FOSS ecosystem, that provide developers with appropriate tools to debug what's going on (ON ANY PLATFORM) and sufficient documentation for them to understand how a certain component of the OS is supposed to behave. I know that in the past 15 years lots of tech-savvy people have opted for Apple products because "they're still UNIX under the hood, and unlike Linux they just work out of the box". But being Unix-like DOES NOT mean to be developer-friendly! Apple is still an opaque developer-unfriendly company even if it provides you with a native bash!

tomxor 6y ago
> I know that in the past 15 years lots of tech-savvy people have opted for Apple products because "they're still UNIX under the hood, and unlike Linux they just work out of the box". But being Unix-like DOES NOT mean to be developer-friendly! Apple is still an opaque developer-unfriendly company even if it provides you with a native bash! That was true over 10 years ago (was certainly a big factor for me), but i'm not so sure it is for most people anymore. I remember back when I bought macs (more than 11 years ago now) they used to proudly advertise their "UNIX" certification and tout the BSD/Mach origins, I think this is when most of the original OS team was still there. But today it seems to be one of the most neglected aspects of the system. Each time one of my colleagues with a mac tries to run one of my considerate bsd/gnu friendly scripts I discover most of their userland has not actually been updated in 10 years. I end up getting them to install brew and replacing every binary used in the script... and yet bizarrely things like ZSH suddenly pop up as the new default shell.
- biztos 6y ago
  I’ve been developing for Linux using Macs for the last 12 years or so. At first I was really into setting up everything just-so on the Mac, with an environment so closely mirroring the production servers that I was confident I could deploy stuff from there to staging. But in the last few years, I ended up just having a reproducible set of dev and stage-like Docker containers. That way I can do all my coding in my nice shiny Apple UI, and all the build/test/run stuff happens in a place I have full control over. This probably doesn’t solve everyone’s problems but for me it was the best way to have my Linux cake and eat my candy Apple too. And yeah, the ZSH thing was super annoying.
foepys 6y ago
Funnily enough, if FOSS developers abandoned the platform, Apple itself would make sure no programs could run after a few releases because they just love changing core APIs.
thw0rted 6y ago
The reason is in the comment just below yours: Apple is a gatekeeper to ~40% of the US (last I checked, that number is low) and why bother writing an open-source tool if only half of your audience can use it? Especially if it's something like a VPN where infrastructure is involved -- you're certainly not going to set up one gateway for Apple users and another for everybody else. We're stuck with this problem until the users have a bad enough experience that they move to a better platform.

tomxor 6y ago

> I know that in the past 15 years lots of tech-savvy people have opted for Apple products because "they're still UNIX under the hood, and unlike Linux they just work out of the box". But being Unix-like DOES NOT mean to be developer-friendly! Apple is still an opaque developer-unfriendly company even if it provides you with a native bash! That was true over 10 years ago (was certainly a big factor for me), but i'm not so sure it is for most people anymore. I remember back when I bought macs (more than 11 years ago now) they used to proudly advertise their "UNIX" certification and tout the BSD/Mach origins, I think this is when most of the original OS team was still there. But today it seems to be one of the most neglected aspects of the system. Each time one of my colleagues with a mac tries to run one of my considerate bsd/gnu friendly scripts I discover most of their userland has not actually been updated in 10 years. I end up getting them to install brew and replacing every binary used in the script... and yet bizarrely things like ZSH suddenly pop up as the new default shell.

biztos 6y ago
I’ve been developing for Linux using Macs for the last 12 years or so. At first I was really into setting up everything just-so on the Mac, with an environment so closely mirroring the production servers that I was confident I could deploy stuff from there to staging. But in the last few years, I ended up just having a reproducible set of dev and stage-like Docker containers. That way I can do all my coding in my nice shiny Apple UI, and all the build/test/run stuff happens in a place I have full control over. This probably doesn’t solve everyone’s problems but for me it was the best way to have my Linux cake and eat my candy Apple too. And yeah, the ZSH thing was super annoying.

foepys 6y ago

Funnily enough, if FOSS developers abandoned the platform, Apple itself would make sure no programs could run after a few releases because they just love changing core APIs.

thw0rted 6y ago

The reason is in the comment just below yours: Apple is a gatekeeper to ~40% of the US (last I checked, that number is low) and why bother writing an open-source tool if only half of your audience can use it? Especially if it's something like a VPN where infrastructure is involved -- you're certainly not going to set up one gateway for Apple users and another for everybody else. We're stuck with this problem until the users have a bad enough experience that they move to a better platform.