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Comment by crocfish | Hacker News Reader

I get an security error when I open this on my mac. Is it hard to become an identified developer?

99/year to not get the security warning. Maybe not worth it for free/open source/hobby projects. Can bypass it by right clicking and choosing ‘Open’ but then you have to make your users aware of that.

Totally an Apple racketeering.

Also, not having the certificate can make it more likely the app will continue to work in future. Apple had an incident where App Store apps stopped working when the App Store certificate was replaced. I lost a few apps that I'd purchased that way (though some developers graciously gave me a non App Store version to work around it):

https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped...

That's an App Store issue, not a developer certificate one.

... and downvotes without a cogent argument against.

Apple is blocking users from running apps (obscure workaround aside) unless the developer pays a yearly fee. How is that not racketeering?

To be clear, we’re not even talking about the App Store here. This is for WWW-distributed Mac apps of the regular kind.

Why do you feel it's racketeering?

Apple is charging developers money to avoid a problem imposed by Apple themselves.

To be fair, the developer subscription includes tools and documentation for Mac/iOS specific development that a price tag is fair for. But for the use case of cross-platform (e.g. Java) open-source development, not even a standard CA-rooted code signing certificate allows distribution without the security error. You have to pay Apple for one, or else your app is 2nd class and your users need workaround instructions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com