Hacker News Reader

Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

> It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash.

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.

View on HN

Apple did help with implementing support for ARM CPUs as mentioned in the changelog: "Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration." Making sure Homebrew works on ARM Mac devices made sense for Apple.

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.

>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.

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.

Might provide stability by making it less likely for key maintainers to walk away because they don't have time for both homebrew and their day job.

Apple needs to dump a truck of money on their own developer tooling team and double every team size. If you knew how small they were you would be surprised!

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.

> Apple would be fools to not support it financially.

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.

One could say Homebrew is successful despite Apple not trying to even mention their name, even less help them be successful. Many groups also look at successful groups and think "How can we make them more successful?" but don't think that's in Apples DNA.

Apple has mentioned Homebrew; a screenshot of it is the banner on their Twitter account.

I mean, I don't run any billion dollar companies, so what do I know, but Apple donating a couple of million to ensure that Homebrew stays active seems like a no-brainer investment to me.

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.

Side note: Apple has been a trillion-dollar company since 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

Microsoft is investing a ton of money in developer productivity for non-traditional Windows developers. Apple has had a mindshare lead there but it’s not a permanent situation and a tiny fraction of their cash on hand is much cheaper than trying to win people back.

I don't know about the "DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY", but a program that formalizes support for the Open Source community on MacOS would be a win for Apple as well as Apple's customers.

Potato, potahto :)

IIRC, Apple does (or at least did) donate Hardware to some of the maintainers. I remember some of the Homebrew maintainers answering in comments here on HN that hey received M1-based MacMinis - this is of course in the interest of Apple but also shows that they do care about it.

As I mentioned in another comment, Apple supports them with hardware and technical resources. Seeing what happened with the whole CentOS mess, I am kind of glad that homebrew remains independent and can continue to do so without relying on Apple’s money.

Yeah, the app store has become a source of a lot of controversy around policies, so signing up for more public criticism of how they handle a package manager is probably a headache they don't need.

> I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages

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.

Yes and no, Apple doesn't want the support issues going into their queue and clogging up their customer support system.

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

Yeah, if Apple says "This is our official package manager, and you can use it to install OpenSSL/nginx/whatever", like or not, they are on the hook if it breaks, and they have to fix it. Like, companies are going to be like "we trusted you and now our website is broken, and we're going to sue you".

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com