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I wonder if you’d have a monetization path here via enterprise support contracts and/or additional device fleet management features. The tech companies I’ve wor

I wonder if you’d have a monetization path here via enterprise support contracts and/or additional device fleet management features. The tech companies I’ve worked at have all had some amount of “use brew to install …” in our dev spinup docs. And IT doesn’t love it because when they get asked to support it, there’s no quick way to see what’s installed or what version without logging into the specific machine. And for whatever reason, it’s also challenging to roll out dev laptops with specific packages already installed. I presume it’s because maintaining them is difficult.

tough 3y ago
This sounds like a great idea and a good COSS lifestyle company to run
tmikaeld 3y ago
That's my first thought as well, there's a lot of IT companies supporting Macs that would LOVE a tool like this, especially if it's commercially supported.
- _1 3y ago
  My company manages Macs with jamf. It comes with a "self service" tool that can install oss apps, apps we've licensed, change configurations, etc.
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    Same here. There are at least a few of such tools, and they are highly customizable.
ljm 3y ago
Assuming everyone's on a Mac, I'm actually surprised there isn't that much use of something like homebrew-bundle[1]. It's definitely nicer to have your tooling run natively rather than, say, trying to wrap everything in Docker, or trying to get everybody on board with nix or guix. I think the only real issue here is that you can't really pin to specific versions unless a formula exists, and there is no guarantee that a formula with a pinned version will stick around because homebrew likes to stay lean. So to that extent it can still be unclear what version of software someone is running on after enough time. [1]https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle/ https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle/
Ambroos 3y ago
There's a decent open source option: https://github.com/munki/munki https://github.com/munki/munki I got to use it at work at Meta (as end user), and it seemed to work quite well. They delivered Android SDKs/IDEs and a bunch of other things that I'd personally install through Brew with Munki.

tough 3y ago

This sounds like a great idea and a good COSS lifestyle company to run

tmikaeld 3y ago

That's my first thought as well, there's a lot of IT companies supporting Macs that would LOVE a tool like this, especially if it's commercially supported.

_1 3y ago
My company manages Macs with jamf. It comes with a "self service" tool that can install oss apps, apps we've licensed, change configurations, etc.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  Same here. There are at least a few of such tools, and they are highly customizable.

ljm 3y ago

Assuming everyone's on a Mac, I'm actually surprised there isn't that much use of something like homebrew-bundle[1]. It's definitely nicer to have your tooling run natively rather than, say, trying to wrap everything in Docker, or trying to get everybody on board with nix or guix. I think the only real issue here is that you can't really pin to specific versions unless a formula exists, and there is no guarantee that a formula with a pinned version will stick around because homebrew likes to stay lean. So to that extent it can still be unclear what version of software someone is running on after enough time. [1]https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle/ https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle/

Ambroos 3y ago

There's a decent open source option: https://github.com/munki/munki https://github.com/munki/munki I got to use it at work at Meta (as end user), and it seemed to work quite well. They delivered Android SDKs/IDEs and a bunch of other things that I'd personally install through Brew with Munki.