This intrepid band of volunteers are adding huge value to one of the largest corporations on earth. I appreciate the DIY effort of anyone who volunteers, though I see the donate tab on their website and sigh a little.
I can understand them not wanting to do it themselves. I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages (for legal reasons or otherwise). Because it's a "not officially Apple" thing, Homebrew can probably get away with a "no warranty" sticker that an official Apple project couldn't.
What Apple should do, however, is ship a DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY to every Homebrew maintainer on a regular basis. That project is crucial to basically every Apple developer, and it massively enriches macOS as a general purpose development platform. Apple would be fools to not support it financially.
That's not how a package manager works. The people responsible for APT/AUR do not maintain all the packages within the repositories themselves. This even applies to the App Store. Apple does not maintain the apps there themselves, it's up to the people publishing the apps. So there really isn't any reasons except they can't make money on it, hence it doesn't exist as an officially sanctioned way of pulling down programs.
When Billy Bob installs the wrong package from Homebrew now he just complains on a forum like this, or on stack overflow. He doesn't email Apple
Homebrew gets away with this a little bit by basically being unofficial, implicitly saying "we're not guaranteeing anything here, this is purely for convenience". It would be much harder to make this argument if you were an official Apple project.
Since people are already doing an excellent job for free, why would they start paying them? Clearly the lack of Apple funding has not hurt the project thus far.
Yeah, Homebrew has been doing this work for free thus far, but open source projects die all the time. It's very much in Apple's interest to ensure this one doesn't.
Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't make it work better.
>wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned,
>Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't
>make it work better.
Well, I think that funding really smart people running really valuable projects tend to make them even more valuable.
Besides, there's some cosmic Karmic justice if this happens.
Xcode / swifts build speed is still pretty bad, xcode still chokes on large projects, codesign is an eternal flaky nightmare, they still don't have first class command line support for many things, they don't have network indexing & build caching like bazel does, it's worse than android for maintaining a device lab for testing (adb vs... `instruments` kind of) and on and on it goes.
That said, it remains disappointing to me that unless you're producing content with Apple's hardware or building apps for the Stores, they don't really do much to help you.
For example, if you're writing client or server-side web code, they will acknowledge your existence, and are more than willing to sell you a Mac, but that's about it.
^ This doesn't even get into the concerns around all of the supporting pieces that go along with this code - e.g, documentation, training materials, and outreach - the tooling for this part of the process is voluminous in its own right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_ge...
Nowadays they don’t want to touch anything GPL so that might be it
If Apple did it, HN would be awash in "Walled garden!" and "Monopoly!" hysteria.
Meanwhile, Apple is now engaging in anticompetitive behavior that I find frustrating. (App Store stuff.) Things have turned on their head.
What was Apple's first product? A computer. A computer meant for people not having a CS background. The Apple II kicked off the home computing revolution, i.e. bringing computing to the masses. The Mac was the computer "for the rest of us" and was aimed squarely at graphic artists, desktop publishers, musicians, and the like.
So yes, Microsoft has always been developer and business focused whereas Apple has always been the computer "for the rest of us."
Also, to be fair to "graphic artists ... and the like", one of the reasons the Mac platform remained popular among graphics arts professionals through the '90s was that system-level inter-application scripting, added to the platform in 1993, was well-supported by both Apple and third-party application vendors, whereas analogous cross-application scripting in Windows was mostly limited to Microsoft Office products.
Apple is more allergic to the GPL than any other company on Earth. They would never do something official that would even put GPL software in their orbit.
For sure Apple employees are using lots of homebrew every day :)
There is no money to get from it. And developers are not the "end user" for Apple anymore. I don't see why Apple should even care about Homebrew.