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Can anyone think of the reason Apple wouldn't provide hardware support to curl and similar projects? To my mind "this dev tool doesn't work, only on Apple, onl

Can anyone think of the reason Apple wouldn't provide hardware support to curl and similar projects? To my mind "this dev tool doesn't work, only on Apple, only on Apple's flagship chips" is the opposite of what they'd like to see happen.

etchalon 4y ago
There's no good reason beyond, "Apple doesn't do that, and never has."
thisarticle 4y ago
The logistics I imagine of doing so for projects would be immense. For ten projects, maybe it wouldn’t be bad, but which ten? Etc.
- albertopv 4y ago
  Apple could just donate a coupon or something like that.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Assuming they do proper due diligence and third party tracking just search the database for the ten libraries they use in the most places themselves ... and yes, that will need some time to coordinate, for identifying the right people in the open source project. But as they certainly depend on quite a few good relations is also in their interest to deal with security issues.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Hmmm I believe Apple must have datacenter full of m1 powered machines for their CI/CD farm. Sending individual devices to individual developers working for n projects might be complicated, however offering a CI/CD environment to projects with ssh access to test virtual machines shouldn't be too complicated for them provided they were ideologically willing to help and cooperate the open source world.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  Curl ships preinstalled on macOS, supporting such preinstalled tools would be a good start (I would hope that Apple has a list somewhere of all the OSS tools they are shipping with macOS).
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yeah my guess is they just don’t have a process for this. Sure, sending a MacBook to the devs of curl probably makes sense and costs virtually nothing. But everyone writing open source is going to want one next so you need some full process to approve requests.
belfalas 4y ago
For 20 years they’ve gotten it for free. Why start paying now? Apple is not a friend to the little guy, quite the opposite. Remember, Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison who famously said that open source is there to be exploited. These guys all think the same way.
- nickpp 4y ago
  Wasn’t it offered for free?! Or was something asking in exchange? There are plenty of licenses which are free only for non-commercial use. The author choose the “free for all” license for a reason though.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    This is missing the point and focusing on the 1st paragraph of the article. 2nd paragraph: > Yet, there are many curl users on the different Apple platforms and sometimes these users run into issues that are unique to those platforms and are challenging to address without direct access to such. In other words, it's to Apple's own detriment if the author of curl doesn't have access to Apple hardware. curl is offered for free, and the consequence of that is the author of curl is under no obligation to support Apple platforms or shell out money for Apple hardware.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      So change the license or stop supporting Apple OS's. Or ask them, or the community for a donation.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > Or ask them, or the community for a donation. First sentence of the article: "A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development."
        sbuk 4y ago
niklasmerz 4y ago
Same goes for Apache Cordova a framework for building mobile apps for Android and iOS. Apple knows a big chunk of apps in the App Store are using it. You can only use it for iOS apps if you have Apple hardware. I am one of the maintainers and thankfully I got a Mac Mini donated as well when I lost my company Mac.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Thank you for your work on Cordova. Have you also worked on Capacitor?
- smugma 4y ago
  Apple would rather you build native apps, not cross platform ones.
varispeed 4y ago
They probably don't want to set up a precedent and that would be against the true spirit of open source - to get people writing software for free, so big corporations can save on R&D and employment costs, while making a ton of money.
frou_dh 4y ago
IIRC, at least around the time Apple Silicon was introduced, they were running some kind of taskforce to make code contributions to key open source projects to ensure they were compatible.
- glandium 4y ago
  Did they? They provided pre-M1 mac minis (aka DTK), but I don't know that they actively contributed code. I don't remember seeing code from them for Firefox, at least (I was involved in getting Firefox to work on Apple Silicon)
  - danbulant 4y ago
    They did for obs[0], didn't see any other projects (I just remember I saw it a while ago, I may have missed other software if they tried). [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      A handful received support. I think Mono got a PR too.
alkonaut 4y ago
Any of us working in an enterprise can probably relate to this similar thing: If I want to purchase a $500 piece of software, that’s a five minute conversation with my manager. If I wanted to donate $50 to a single person who has developed a critical bit of open source we as a company gas relied on for ten years, it would be a major hassle.
- carstenhag 4y ago
  Nah, even purchasing a 500€/$ piece of anything involves a lot of talking, procurement and waiting. At least in most german companies.
  - chaosite 4y ago
    Sure, but even in German companies if you want to purchase a 500€ piece of software there's a procurement process that you can go through. There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Well, correct, you wouldn't buy it for a donation You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept) When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Can’t you donate the money and then they buy the hardware?
      - 95014_refugee 4y ago
        If by "you" you mean "the corporation", then no. A software BU doesn't make donations. It can purchase things, which is the point of the quoted comment, but it can't just give money away. From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery. Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.
fweimer 4y ago
Apple has proprietary, in-house solutions for these tasks. If I were an employee working on one of those, I wouldn't like if a different part of the company provided support to or funding for an alternative to the thing I'm working on.
- nisegami 4y ago
  Then they should ship those solutions with their products and provide support for it to end users instead of pawning them off to the curl team for support.
  - fweimer 4y ago
    They do? https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne... But it's a big company, so presumably some team used curl for some project, leaked that in an error message, and whoever runs the Apple Support social media account apparently didn't know about that after someone contacted them about the error message. Or something like that, it's hard to figure out what was going on without more context.
    - berkut 4y ago
      curl is shipped (by Apple) as a command line tool and libs to link against on stock MacOS (unless Xcode installs it these days, but I don't think so?).
gregoriol 4y ago
Apple would more likely develop their own similar code instead.
amelius 4y ago
Well they get great publicity from all the "Now available on M1 too!" posts on HN.
Teever 4y ago
Bexause they don't want to. its that simple. Any time you see a behemoth like Apple not doing something it's because they don't want to. They don't consider whatever gains they get from it to be worth the time and money.

etchalon 4y ago

There's no good reason beyond, "Apple doesn't do that, and never has."

thisarticle 4y ago

The logistics I imagine of doing so for projects would be immense. For ten projects, maybe it wouldn’t be bad, but which ten? Etc.

albertopv 4y ago
Apple could just donate a coupon or something like that.
johannes1234321 4y ago
Assuming they do proper due diligence and third party tracking just search the database for the ten libraries they use in the most places themselves ... and yes, that will need some time to coordinate, for identifying the right people in the open source project. But as they certainly depend on quite a few good relations is also in their interest to deal with security issues.
prmoustache 4y ago
Hmmm I believe Apple must have datacenter full of m1 powered machines for their CI/CD farm. Sending individual devices to individual developers working for n projects might be complicated, however offering a CI/CD environment to projects with ssh access to test virtual machines shouldn't be too complicated for them provided they were ideologically willing to help and cooperate the open source world.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Curl ships preinstalled on macOS, supporting such preinstalled tools would be a good start (I would hope that Apple has a list somewhere of all the OSS tools they are shipping with macOS).
- saagarjha 4y ago
  https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
Gigachad 4y ago
Yeah my guess is they just don’t have a process for this. Sure, sending a MacBook to the devs of curl probably makes sense and costs virtually nothing. But everyone writing open source is going to want one next so you need some full process to approve requests.

belfalas 4y ago

For 20 years they’ve gotten it for free. Why start paying now? Apple is not a friend to the little guy, quite the opposite. Remember, Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison who famously said that open source is there to be exploited. These guys all think the same way.

nickpp 4y ago
Wasn’t it offered for free?! Or was something asking in exchange? There are plenty of licenses which are free only for non-commercial use. The author choose the “free for all” license for a reason though.
- lapcat 4y ago
  This is missing the point and focusing on the 1st paragraph of the article. 2nd paragraph: > Yet, there are many curl users on the different Apple platforms and sometimes these users run into issues that are unique to those platforms and are challenging to address without direct access to such. In other words, it's to Apple's own detriment if the author of curl doesn't have access to Apple hardware. curl is offered for free, and the consequence of that is the author of curl is under no obligation to support Apple platforms or shell out money for Apple hardware.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    So change the license or stop supporting Apple OS's. Or ask them, or the community for a donation.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > Or ask them, or the community for a donation. First sentence of the article: "A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development."
      - sbuk 4y ago

niklasmerz 4y ago

Same goes for Apache Cordova a framework for building mobile apps for Android and iOS. Apple knows a big chunk of apps in the App Store are using it. You can only use it for iOS apps if you have Apple hardware. I am one of the maintainers and thankfully I got a Mac Mini donated as well when I lost my company Mac.

sroussey 4y ago
Thank you for your work on Cordova. Have you also worked on Capacitor?
smugma 4y ago
Apple would rather you build native apps, not cross platform ones.

varispeed 4y ago

They probably don't want to set up a precedent and that would be against the true spirit of open source - to get people writing software for free, so big corporations can save on R&D and employment costs, while making a ton of money.

frou_dh 4y ago

IIRC, at least around the time Apple Silicon was introduced, they were running some kind of taskforce to make code contributions to key open source projects to ensure they were compatible.

glandium 4y ago
Did they? They provided pre-M1 mac minis (aka DTK), but I don't know that they actively contributed code. I don't remember seeing code from them for Firefox, at least (I was involved in getting Firefox to work on Apple Silicon)
- danbulant 4y ago
  They did for obs[0], didn't see any other projects (I just remember I saw it a while ago, I may have missed other software if they tried). [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    A handful received support. I think Mono got a PR too.

alkonaut 4y ago

Any of us working in an enterprise can probably relate to this similar thing: If I want to purchase a $500 piece of software, that’s a five minute conversation with my manager. If I wanted to donate $50 to a single person who has developed a critical bit of open source we as a company gas relied on for ten years, it would be a major hassle.

carstenhag 4y ago
Nah, even purchasing a 500€/$ piece of anything involves a lot of talking, procurement and waiting. At least in most german companies.
- chaosite 4y ago
  Sure, but even in German companies if you want to purchase a 500€ piece of software there's a procurement process that you can go through. There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Well, correct, you wouldn't buy it for a donation You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept) When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Can’t you donate the money and then they buy the hardware?
    - 95014_refugee 4y ago
      If by "you" you mean "the corporation", then no. A software BU doesn't make donations. It can purchase things, which is the point of the quoted comment, but it can't just give money away. From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery. Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.

fweimer 4y ago

Apple has proprietary, in-house solutions for these tasks. If I were an employee working on one of those, I wouldn't like if a different part of the company provided support to or funding for an alternative to the thing I'm working on.

nisegami 4y ago
Then they should ship those solutions with their products and provide support for it to end users instead of pawning them off to the curl team for support.
- fweimer 4y ago
  They do? https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne... But it's a big company, so presumably some team used curl for some project, leaked that in an error message, and whoever runs the Apple Support social media account apparently didn't know about that after someone contacted them about the error message. Or something like that, it's hard to figure out what was going on without more context.
  - berkut 4y ago
    curl is shipped (by Apple) as a command line tool and libs to link against on stock MacOS (unless Xcode installs it these days, but I don't think so?).

gregoriol 4y ago

Apple would more likely develop their own similar code instead.

amelius 4y ago

Well they get great publicity from all the "Now available on M1 too!" posts on HN.

Teever 4y ago

Bexause they don't want to. its that simple. Any time you see a behemoth like Apple not doing something it's because they don't want to. They don't consider whatever gains they get from it to be worth the time and money.