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It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. And it’s important for devs to have up to date tooling. This intrepid

It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. And it’s important for devs to have up to date tooling. This intrepid band of volunteers are adding huge value to one of the largest corporations on earth. I appreciate the DIY effort of anyone who volunteers, though I see the donate tab on their website and sigh a little.

OskarS 6y ago
> It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. I can understand them not wanting to do it themselves. I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages (for legal reasons or otherwise). Because it's a "not officially Apple" thing, Homebrew can probably get away with a "no warranty" sticker that an official Apple project couldn't. What Apple should do, however, is ship a DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY to every Homebrew maintainer on a regular basis. That project is crucial to basically every Apple developer, and it massively enriches macOS as a general purpose development platform. Apple would be fools to not support it financially.
- capableweb 6y ago
  > I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages That's not how a package manager works. The people responsible for APT/AUR do not maintain all the packages within the repositories themselves. This even applies to the App Store. Apple does not maintain the apps there themselves, it's up to the people publishing the apps. So there really isn't any reasons except they can't make money on it, hence it doesn't exist as an officially sanctioned way of pulling down programs.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Yes and no, Apple doesn't want the support issues going into their queue and clogging up their customer support system. When Billy Bob installs the wrong package from Homebrew now he just complains on a forum like this, or on stack overflow. He doesn't email Apple
    - OskarS 6y ago
      Yeah, if Apple says "This is our official package manager, and you can use it to install OpenSSL/nginx/whatever", like or not, they are on the hook if it breaks, and they have to fix it. Like, companies are going to be like "we trusted you and now our website is broken, and we're going to sue you". Homebrew gets away with this a little bit by basically being unofficial, implicitly saying "we're not guaranteeing anything here, this is purely for convenience". It would be much harder to make this argument if you were an official Apple project.
- WJW 6y ago
  > Apple would be fools to not support it financially. Since people are already doing an excellent job for free, why would they start paying them? Clearly the lack of Apple funding has not hurt the project thus far.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    One could say Homebrew is successful despite Apple not trying to even mention their name, even less help them be successful. Many groups also look at successful groups and think "How can we make them more successful?" but don't think that's in Apples DNA.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Apple has mentioned Homebrew; a screenshot of it is the banner on their Twitter account.
  - OskarS 6y ago
    I mean, I don't run any billion dollar companies, so what do I know, but Apple donating a couple of million to ensure that Homebrew stays active seems like a no-brainer investment to me. Yeah, Homebrew has been doing this work for free thus far, but open source projects die all the time. It's very much in Apple's interest to ensure this one doesn't.
    - EForEndeavour 6y ago
      Side note: Apple has been a trillion-dollar company since 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
  - acdha 6y ago
    Microsoft is investing a ton of money in developer productivity for non-traditional Windows developers. Apple has had a mindshare lead there but it’s not a permanent situation and a tiny fraction of their cash on hand is much cheaper than trying to win people back.
- maliker 6y ago
  Yeah, the app store has become a source of a lot of controversy around policies, so signing up for more public criticism of how they handle a package manager is probably a headache they don't need.
- GlitchMr 6y ago
  Apple did help with implementing support for ARM CPUs as mentioned in the changelog: "Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration." Making sure Homebrew works on ARM Mac devices made sense for Apple. Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't make it work better.
  - JeremyBanks 6y ago
    Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't make it work better. This is idiotic.
    - 9dev 6y ago
      Try putting on your management hat. Would you approve donating money to some random project that vaguely benefits the users of your platform, with no apparent reason? After all, the Tool seems to work fine and nobody is complaining. You can surely imagine the course of such an initiative inside Apple.
      - zimpenfish 6y ago
        > some random project that vaguely benefits the users of your platform Be interesting to see what percentage of users actually install Homebrew - I'd wildly stab in the dark about 25-30%, tops?
  - guytv 6y ago
    >Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew >wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, >Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't >make it work better. Well, I think that funding really smart people running really valuable projects tend to make them even more valuable. Besides, there's some cosmic Karmic justice if this happens.
  - 6y ago
- littlecranky67 6y ago
  IIRC, Apple does (or at least did) donate Hardware to some of the maintainers. I remember some of the Homebrew maintainers answering in comments here on HN that hey received M1-based MacMinis - this is of course in the interest of Apple but also shows that they do care about it.
- jaboutboul 6y ago
  As I mentioned in another comment, Apple supports them with hardware and technical resources. Seeing what happened with the whole CentOS mess, I am kind of glad that homebrew remains independent and can continue to do so without relying on Apple’s money.
- dave_aiello 6y ago
  I don't know about the "DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY", but a program that formalizes support for the Open Source community on MacOS would be a win for Apple as well as Apple's customers.
  - OskarS 6y ago
    Potato, potahto :)
- novok 6y ago
  Apple needs to dump a truck of money on their own developer tooling team and double every team size. If you knew how small they were you would be surprised! Xcode / swifts build speed is still pretty bad, xcode still chokes on large projects, codesign is an eternal flaky nightmare, they still don't have first class command line support for many things, they don't have network indexing & build caching like bazel does, it's worse than android for maintaining a device lab for testing (adb vs... `instruments` kind of) and on and on it goes.
Yaggo 6y ago
I don't think it's weird. Actually I think it's important to keep this as a community effort, in the spirit of FOSS. From developers, to developers, you know. Surely it would be nice for the maintainers if Apple could throw in some cash, though :)
agsnu 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPorts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPorts (nee DarwinPorts) was started with the involvement/sponsorship of Apple and was probably the most popular Mac OS X package manager / port library around the mid-00s.
cies 6y ago
If someone is doing it for free, why step up and spend money on it? /s For sure Apple employees are using lots of homebrew every day :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Phenix88be 6y ago
> It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. And it’s important for devs to have up to date tooling. There is no money to get from it. And developers are not the "end user" for Apple anymore. I don't see why Apple should even care about Homebrew.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Not directly, but developers provide Apple with billions of dollars in value every year.
chrisfinazzo 6y ago
In the case of Swift, they actually took this advice to heart - and hired Max to help them do it. That said, it remains disappointing to me that unless you're producing content with Apple's hardware or building apps for the Stores, they don't really do much to help you. For example, if you're writing client or server-side web code, they will acknowledge your existence, and are more than willing to sell you a Mac, but that's about it. ^ This doesn't even get into the concerns around all of the supporting pieces that go along with this code - e.g, documentation, training materials, and outreach - the tooling for this part of the process is voluminous in its own right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_ge...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
shp0ngle 6y ago
Apple did sort of half-officially supported MacPorts, precursor of Brew. Nowadays they don’t want to touch anything GPL so that might be it
reaperducer 6y ago
It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. If Apple did it, HN would be awash in "Walled garden!" and "Monopoly!" hysteria.
Steltek 6y ago
It saddens me as I see this massive infusion of developer time and energy being donated to one of the biggest tech companies around. If that effort had instead gone into making Linux better, which Homebrew obviously builds on, where would Linux workstations be now? Would I get a nice Linux laptop from my company instead of being forced to use a MacBook?
- taylodl 6y ago
  Contributing to Linux also helps the biggest tech companies around - namely IBM and Oracle amongst a host of others. When you contribute to free and open source software you should know and understand you're providing your labor for free to tech behemoths. For most it's a labor of love and aligns with their passion and so everything is cool but you run across a few who's feelings get hurt and feel like they're getting ripped-off.
  - LiberatedLlama 6y ago
    Contributing specifically to the desktop experience of Linux is another matter (unless maybe you're a GNOME developer.)
  - acomjean 6y ago
    Well if you donate code to linux anyone can use your donation for free. It helps everyone not one specific hardware vendor. (unless your donating drivers...)
augustl 6y ago
It seems to me that if you compare Apple and Microsoft, it's only the latter that cares deeply about the developer experience on their platform. https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
- redwall_hp 6y ago
  It's really weird adjusting to a post-Ballmer Microsoft. I have plenty of existing loathing for that company from their behavior towards Netscape and Linux in the 90s and early 2000s (among other, smaller players). However, their developer-focused offerings are amazing, now that they made .NET Core open. C# is great to work with. Meanwhile, Apple is now engaging in anticompetitive behavior that I find frustrating. (App Store stuff.) Things have turned on their head.
- taylodl 6y ago
  That's been mostly true since both of the company's founding (Microsoft in 1975 and Apple's in 1976). What was Microsoft's first product? Basic. Microsoft's Basic ran on the most popular home computer platforms of the day (except Apple's). Even Commodore's Basic was fully interoperable with Microsoft's. What was Apple's first product? A computer. A computer meant for people not having a CS background. The Apple II kicked off the home computing revolution, i.e. bringing computing to the masses. The Mac was the computer "for the rest of us" and was aimed squarely at graphic artists, desktop publishers, musicians, and the like. So yes, Microsoft has always been developer and business focused whereas Apple has always been the computer "for the rest of us."
  - jasomill 6y ago
    Pedantically, while it's true that the Apple II originally shipped with Steve Wozniak's Integer BASIC interpreter, a Microsoft BASIC implementation, Applesoft BASIC, was licensed soon after the II's release and replaced Integer BASIC in ROM on the II+ and all future models. Also, to be fair to "graphic artists ... and the like", one of the reasons the Mac platform remained popular among graphics arts professionals through the '90s was that system-level inter-application scripting, added to the platform in 1993, was well-supported by both Apple and third-party application vendors, whereas analogous cross-application scripting in Windows was mostly limited to Microsoft Office products.
teilo 6y ago
Apple is not a good steward of open source projects. We saw what happened with CUPS. Apple took it over and it basically died.
busterarm 6y ago
Too much of the tooling that people want to use is GPL. Apple is more allergic to the GPL than any other company on Earth. They would never do something official that would even put GPL software in their orbit.

OskarS 6y ago

> It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. I can understand them not wanting to do it themselves. I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages (for legal reasons or otherwise). Because it's a "not officially Apple" thing, Homebrew can probably get away with a "no warranty" sticker that an official Apple project couldn't. What Apple should do, however, is ship a DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY to every Homebrew maintainer on a regular basis. That project is crucial to basically every Apple developer, and it massively enriches macOS as a general purpose development platform. Apple would be fools to not support it financially.

capableweb 6y ago
> I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages That's not how a package manager works. The people responsible for APT/AUR do not maintain all the packages within the repositories themselves. This even applies to the App Store. Apple does not maintain the apps there themselves, it's up to the people publishing the apps. So there really isn't any reasons except they can't make money on it, hence it doesn't exist as an officially sanctioned way of pulling down programs.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Yes and no, Apple doesn't want the support issues going into their queue and clogging up their customer support system. When Billy Bob installs the wrong package from Homebrew now he just complains on a forum like this, or on stack overflow. He doesn't email Apple
  - OskarS 6y ago
    Yeah, if Apple says "This is our official package manager, and you can use it to install OpenSSL/nginx/whatever", like or not, they are on the hook if it breaks, and they have to fix it. Like, companies are going to be like "we trusted you and now our website is broken, and we're going to sue you". Homebrew gets away with this a little bit by basically being unofficial, implicitly saying "we're not guaranteeing anything here, this is purely for convenience". It would be much harder to make this argument if you were an official Apple project.
WJW 6y ago
> Apple would be fools to not support it financially. Since people are already doing an excellent job for free, why would they start paying them? Clearly the lack of Apple funding has not hurt the project thus far.
- capableweb 6y ago
  One could say Homebrew is successful despite Apple not trying to even mention their name, even less help them be successful. Many groups also look at successful groups and think "How can we make them more successful?" but don't think that's in Apples DNA.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Apple has mentioned Homebrew; a screenshot of it is the banner on their Twitter account.
- OskarS 6y ago
  I mean, I don't run any billion dollar companies, so what do I know, but Apple donating a couple of million to ensure that Homebrew stays active seems like a no-brainer investment to me. Yeah, Homebrew has been doing this work for free thus far, but open source projects die all the time. It's very much in Apple's interest to ensure this one doesn't.
  - EForEndeavour 6y ago
    Side note: Apple has been a trillion-dollar company since 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
- acdha 6y ago
  Microsoft is investing a ton of money in developer productivity for non-traditional Windows developers. Apple has had a mindshare lead there but it’s not a permanent situation and a tiny fraction of their cash on hand is much cheaper than trying to win people back.
maliker 6y ago
Yeah, the app store has become a source of a lot of controversy around policies, so signing up for more public criticism of how they handle a package manager is probably a headache they don't need.
GlitchMr 6y ago
Apple did help with implementing support for ARM CPUs as mentioned in the changelog: "Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration." Making sure Homebrew works on ARM Mac devices made sense for Apple. Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't make it work better.
- JeremyBanks 6y ago
  Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't make it work better. This is idiotic.
  - 9dev 6y ago
    Try putting on your management hat. Would you approve donating money to some random project that vaguely benefits the users of your platform, with no apparent reason? After all, the Tool seems to work fine and nobody is complaining. You can surely imagine the course of such an initiative inside Apple.
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      > some random project that vaguely benefits the users of your platform Be interesting to see what percentage of users actually install Homebrew - I'd wildly stab in the dark about 25-30%, tops?
- guytv 6y ago
  >Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew >wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, >Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't >make it work better. Well, I think that funding really smart people running really valuable projects tend to make them even more valuable. Besides, there's some cosmic Karmic justice if this happens.
- 6y ago
littlecranky67 6y ago
IIRC, Apple does (or at least did) donate Hardware to some of the maintainers. I remember some of the Homebrew maintainers answering in comments here on HN that hey received M1-based MacMinis - this is of course in the interest of Apple but also shows that they do care about it.
jaboutboul 6y ago
As I mentioned in another comment, Apple supports them with hardware and technical resources. Seeing what happened with the whole CentOS mess, I am kind of glad that homebrew remains independent and can continue to do so without relying on Apple’s money.
dave_aiello 6y ago
I don't know about the "DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY", but a program that formalizes support for the Open Source community on MacOS would be a win for Apple as well as Apple's customers.
- OskarS 6y ago
  Potato, potahto :)
novok 6y ago
Apple needs to dump a truck of money on their own developer tooling team and double every team size. If you knew how small they were you would be surprised! Xcode / swifts build speed is still pretty bad, xcode still chokes on large projects, codesign is an eternal flaky nightmare, they still don't have first class command line support for many things, they don't have network indexing & build caching like bazel does, it's worse than android for maintaining a device lab for testing (adb vs... `instruments` kind of) and on and on it goes.

Yaggo 6y ago

I don't think it's weird. Actually I think it's important to keep this as a community effort, in the spirit of FOSS. From developers, to developers, you know. Surely it would be nice for the maintainers if Apple could throw in some cash, though :)

agsnu 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPorts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPorts (nee DarwinPorts) was started with the involvement/sponsorship of Apple and was probably the most popular Mac OS X package manager / port library around the mid-00s.

cies 6y ago

If someone is doing it for free, why step up and spend money on it? /s For sure Apple employees are using lots of homebrew every day :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Phenix88be 6y ago

> It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. And it’s important for devs to have up to date tooling. There is no money to get from it. And developers are not the "end user" for Apple anymore. I don't see why Apple should even care about Homebrew.

saagarjha 6y ago
Not directly, but developers provide Apple with billions of dollars in value every year.

chrisfinazzo 6y ago

In the case of Swift, they actually took this advice to heart - and hired Max to help them do it. That said, it remains disappointing to me that unless you're producing content with Apple's hardware or building apps for the Stores, they don't really do much to help you. For example, if you're writing client or server-side web code, they will acknowledge your existence, and are more than willing to sell you a Mac, but that's about it. ^ This doesn't even get into the concerns around all of the supporting pieces that go along with this code - e.g, documentation, training materials, and outreach - the tooling for this part of the process is voluminous in its own right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_ge...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

shp0ngle 6y ago

Apple did sort of half-officially supported MacPorts, precursor of Brew. Nowadays they don’t want to touch anything GPL so that might be it

reaperducer 6y ago

It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. If Apple did it, HN would be awash in "Walled garden!" and "Monopoly!" hysteria.

Steltek 6y ago

It saddens me as I see this massive infusion of developer time and energy being donated to one of the biggest tech companies around. If that effort had instead gone into making Linux better, which Homebrew obviously builds on, where would Linux workstations be now? Would I get a nice Linux laptop from my company instead of being forced to use a MacBook?

taylodl 6y ago
Contributing to Linux also helps the biggest tech companies around - namely IBM and Oracle amongst a host of others. When you contribute to free and open source software you should know and understand you're providing your labor for free to tech behemoths. For most it's a labor of love and aligns with their passion and so everything is cool but you run across a few who's feelings get hurt and feel like they're getting ripped-off.
- LiberatedLlama 6y ago
  Contributing specifically to the desktop experience of Linux is another matter (unless maybe you're a GNOME developer.)
- acomjean 6y ago
  Well if you donate code to linux anyone can use your donation for free. It helps everyone not one specific hardware vendor. (unless your donating drivers...)

augustl 6y ago

It seems to me that if you compare Apple and Microsoft, it's only the latter that cares deeply about the developer experience on their platform. https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

redwall_hp 6y ago
It's really weird adjusting to a post-Ballmer Microsoft. I have plenty of existing loathing for that company from their behavior towards Netscape and Linux in the 90s and early 2000s (among other, smaller players). However, their developer-focused offerings are amazing, now that they made .NET Core open. C# is great to work with. Meanwhile, Apple is now engaging in anticompetitive behavior that I find frustrating. (App Store stuff.) Things have turned on their head.
taylodl 6y ago
That's been mostly true since both of the company's founding (Microsoft in 1975 and Apple's in 1976). What was Microsoft's first product? Basic. Microsoft's Basic ran on the most popular home computer platforms of the day (except Apple's). Even Commodore's Basic was fully interoperable with Microsoft's. What was Apple's first product? A computer. A computer meant for people not having a CS background. The Apple II kicked off the home computing revolution, i.e. bringing computing to the masses. The Mac was the computer "for the rest of us" and was aimed squarely at graphic artists, desktop publishers, musicians, and the like. So yes, Microsoft has always been developer and business focused whereas Apple has always been the computer "for the rest of us."
- jasomill 6y ago
  Pedantically, while it's true that the Apple II originally shipped with Steve Wozniak's Integer BASIC interpreter, a Microsoft BASIC implementation, Applesoft BASIC, was licensed soon after the II's release and replaced Integer BASIC in ROM on the II+ and all future models. Also, to be fair to "graphic artists ... and the like", one of the reasons the Mac platform remained popular among graphics arts professionals through the '90s was that system-level inter-application scripting, added to the platform in 1993, was well-supported by both Apple and third-party application vendors, whereas analogous cross-application scripting in Windows was mostly limited to Microsoft Office products.

teilo 6y ago

Apple is not a good steward of open source projects. We saw what happened with CUPS. Apple took it over and it basically died.

busterarm 6y ago

Too much of the tooling that people want to use is GPL. Apple is more allergic to the GPL than any other company on Earth. They would never do something official that would even put GPL software in their orbit.