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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

What makes you thing that open source developers are fine with that? What are their other choices? Apple doesn’t care.

The choice is don't build for MacOS. In the long run Apple won't be happy with that and maybe they'll waive the fee.

How would that get them to waive the fee? If your app is open source and they wanted it that bad they could just build it themselves, or develop their own replacement for it, and anybody else can pound sand.

They have you over a barrel and they know it.

So let's Apple port, build and distribute open source for MacOS. I have no problem with that. Yet I bet it would cost Apple more than the money they do from the license they sell to OS developers.

But they're not going to do that for your project, only the ones they actually care about. In fact they already do this. Your macOS comes with bash (the old one because they don't like the new license) and a slew of other open source software. The whole thing is built on top of BSD. So they take what they want and then make you pay them for anything else.

No problem with MacOS having only the open source programs Apple care about. In that scenario if Apple want that developers keep buying their hardware they'll have care about a lot of software or hope that everybody will be happy to work in a Linux VM, possibly with a Linux desktop. Imagine a Mac with no docker, no GNU userland and dev tools (if they're a thing on MacOS), no vim, no Node, no Python, etc.

How is that supposed to help all the small time developers that are trying to get started on a side project and want to distribute it to their 200 existing customers who Apple doesn't care about at all?

They're not the developers I was thinking about. I was thinking about the kind of open source projects that are installed by 100k-100M people.

Misunderstanding sorted out, let's see. If I wanted to reach 200 customers on MacOS (real or leads) probably I can invest 0.5 USD per customer and see if I end up making some money because one of them hires me to do anything.

> In the long run Apple won't be happy with that and maybe they'll waive the fee.

I think you greatly overestimate how much Apple cares about this.

I think you underestimate how many power users use macOS. Most of their privacy and security marketing isn't really targeted at normal people. The avg. person doesn't really care that much.

It’s pretty impressive that Ubuntu and Arch (Power User-only experiences in my mind) are considered an alternative to macOS by anyone at all. It shows the Linux desktop is actually delivering something very valuable despite the numbers. Although that the numbers don’t tell the whole story isn’t really saying much.

What if it turned out that ease of use and OS-wide app consistency was the easy part all along? That building good APIs - which includes not changing them, making a good publishing experience - which includes not changing your rules every six months, and making your developers rich - which includes lowering fees - were the hard parts?

Besides the average person does care about privacy and security. Keychain is a product everyone on macOS and iOS uses. Imagine if the OS forced Private Browsing to actually work.

How reliable is the security vetting in the Ubuntu store?

The thing to remember is that, under all the chrome and Apple styling, macOS is rooted in BSD. So the power users who enjoy the *nix-y bits of macOS and are looking for a replacement will look for something that gives them more of that.

Is this a real thing? Like there are people that don't VM/SSH into Linux but use shell?

What demographic is this? College kids and Apple employees?

It seems like minor benefit in an otherwise atrocious platform.

Over the years I haven't found very many unix tools I couldn't install with homebrew. I'm also a big fan of the move from Bash to ZSH. Why start up a VM or SSH into another machine if I can just use Terminal or Iterm.

I don't understand.

What commands are you sending your macbook outside installations?

It's not like you are running a server, you still need to SSH into the server to do anything.

For what it's worth, look-and-feel is arguably more consistent on an OSS desktop than the average commercial workstation, these days. The vast majority of free apps and DEs are built on either GTK or QT, which have a broadly similar feel and can be themed to look identical. Meanwhile, closed/commerical apps are a mess of in-house toolkits and embedded web interfaces, and Windows even has several inconsistent styles in the base install.

You are overestimating how many power users use Apple products.

If you are technology literate, you've seen the evils of Apple for decades.

A power user fixes their own problem, not waits years for Apple to fix it.

This is clearly anecdotal, but nearly every dev/engineer from every company I have ever worked for has had an MBP as their work laptop.

I'm the other way, I've never seen a Macbook in an (Engineering) office setting, four fortune 500, two small businesses.

I've seen them at University and some non STEM students homes.

That said, I see iPhones at work, but probably because they are not critical to doing anything other than email.

I worked at SAP for seven years in their cloud business and about half the engineering staff had MBP laptops. Some engineering teams used only Macs. Operations was the same way. Engineering computer usage in India was mostly Windows, China was ~50% Macs, US/Canada was ~80% Macs, and Europe was ~50% Macs.

Software is not Engineering. You guys call your developers Engineers?

.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering

"One of the core issues in software engineering is that its approaches are not empirical enough because a real-world validation of approaches is usually absent, or very limited and hence software engineering is often misinterpreted as feasible only in a "theoretical environment.""

Software engineering is Engineering like sandwich Engineer is Engineering.

They should use "specialist". It's not like they are using science to prove something will work.

I haven't been building Apps on their platform. Apple advertises to me daily.

Not sure if related.

They do waive it for non-profits, if they have the right paperwork. I'm sure Mozilla/Apache/WordPress/Free Software Foundations could get a $0 key if they wanted.

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