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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree, especially because a signing key is $100 a year. Feels like the church selling indulgences.

That said, it's not quite as bad as your link. The secret is to right click or control click on the app, and choose Open. The warning dialog will have an Open button to bypass the Security pref pane. (Though maybe that doesn't work for you since you're making a CLI tool?)

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I disagree, I don't really want the signing key to be $0.99 and someone just making 100+ developer accounts that can't be tracked with some leaked list of SSNs or similar. That would negate the whole point of the signing key for the end user almost entirely.

The $100 fee is no barrier at all to professional criminals. Whereas it's a huge barrier for open source developers.

Maybe a fee waiver for oss with certain licenses and dev accounts for .edu addresses with a couple other ID requirements would be a good start.

What you're seeking is proper identity verification, not necessarily a tariff or upfront cost to even do business.

Is proper identify verification something that Apple can do at a marginal cost significantly lower than $100?

I agree that the $100 fee in no way guarantees proper identity verification has been done. I also see plenty of other unnecessary barriers the fee creates, I just don't know what an obvious alternative would be.

$100 per year for distributing opensource app is way too much. $100 may be low in your country but its half salary for month in our country.

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