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Comment by thothamon | Hacker News Reader

Well. We'll see what they do, but Apple had better be very careful. If a lot of OSS software won't run on Apple's new chip, then it becomes very hard for a software developer like myself to stick with Apple. And it is developer energy that sustains the software ecosystem for Apple....including many developers who are in the Mac ecosystem to develop for iOS.

This is not necessarily the wrong move for Apple, but it is fraught with danger. Here be dragons.

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Much of the OSS stuff people run on macs - like the stuff that's in brew - already runs on various ARM based platforms. That's why your little raspberry pi can run a 'real desktop'.

OSS software can "just" be recompiled though.

In theory yes, but back in the PPC days a lot of stuff was not available even though theoretically it could have been.

This was complicated by the fact that PPC was big endian and Intel is little endian. If software assumed byte order when twiddling bits, etc, you could not just recompile it.

If iOS will be by that time the only mainstream way to make money from developing software (happening already), people would care very little about OSS there...

By definition, if the maintainer of some OSS software doesn't have the time/energy/willingness to make the software run on Apple's new chip, you can do it yourself.

True, but right now I don't have to do it myself. Things like brew just work. If the proposal is to throw away something that works, and add the burden of doing it myself to my to-do list, that doesn't sound at all appealing.

Brew is maintained. If there is indeed an architectural switch, you would expect Brew to be one of the first projects to actively embrace it and make things just work.

Keep in mind that Apple has a veritable army of ARM developers (thanks to the iOS app store) which

1. doesn't suck 2. pays very well 3. has already demonstrated multiplatform apps with iPad / iPhone

But unless the software has embedded assembly, most likely you can just recompile it and run it fine. Even easier if it is written in languages other than C/C++.

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