Comment by LukeShu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LukeShu | Hacker News Reader

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> But I hope we don't see any tedious comments here about how this is a moral outrage because all software should be fr£e.

All software should be free-as-in-freedom, but not nescessarily free-as-in-£; though I acknowledge that the former without the latter is often problematic. Plus, even beyond the "moral should", practically speaking, going non-FOSS this means it gets excluded from GNU/Linux distro packages, which IMO would be a fatal hit for something like this.

But honestly, I'm fine with this move. It's still FOSS for FOSS-systems, while support for non-FOSS systems is non-FOSS. The folks who care about free-as-in-freedom won't be affected by this. And even then, the non-FOSS `sold` is source-available, which covers 3 of the 4 freedoms; and IMO that missing freedom is the least important.

> I still suspect they won't succeed. How many businesses are so constrained by link times on Mac that they're willing to pay to reduce them? (And go through the admin effort of paying for something.)

A reasonable amount of software is "free-as-in-£ for personal use, paid for professional use." Lots of orgs are willing to ask individual devs "are there any dev tools you use that we should be paying for" and are willing to pay the $50/mo for IntelliJ, so $10/mo for `sold` seems to me like it stands a chance? Note that `sold` is still free-as-in-£ for use in CI/CD, and is only paid for individual-developer use.

>But honestly, I'm fine with this move. It's still FOSS for FOSS-systems, while support for non-FOSS systems is non-FOSS. The folks who care about free-as-in-freedom won't be affected by this.

I completely agree. If you believe "software should be Free!", then you're going to be using a Linux (or other FOSS) system, not MacOS. On top of that, Apple users are happy to pay through the nose for Apple products, plus apps in the Apple app store. Many studies have shown that app developers make much more money in the Apple app store than in the Google Play store, because Apple users love spending money on stuff, and Android users tend to be much more frugal. Apple users were the ones totally happy to throw away their wired headphones and rush out and buy $150 AirPods when Apple took away their headphone jacks. So this company is smart with this move: make the product a paid product for that group of users that has proven they're happy to spend lots of money on things. If anything, this company might have erred by not pricing it high enough to make it look like a luxury purchase.

> Android users tend to be much more frugal

Or maybe they are not as rich, since Apple is essentially a filter for "people who are willing to spend 700+ for a phone". Or they have more choices with better free/cheaper applications. Or they are able to pirate.

Being rich doesn't necessarily mean being stupid with your money; lots of rich people are infamously cheap in fact (the character of Ebeneezer Scrooge wasn't completely made-up after all). Apple phones are very high-priced in terms of features/$ compared to the highest-end Android phones, and many Android phones are in the same price territory (such as the Galaxy series).

In the US, though, there's definitely a perception that Apple is for richer people and Android is for cheapskates.

I don't see how those two things are mutually exclusive.

But yes, it is a filter, which is why business tend to start out on iOS for early revenue numbers, and only port to Android a year later at the earliest. If you start out on Android, you'll inherently have lower revenue numbers, and spending time on your Android app is basically burning money when you're still in your Angel/Series A phases.

> Note that `sold` is still free-as-in-£ for use in CI/CD

The relevant part of the EULA [1] states:

> Individuals who use the Software only occasionally, or non-interactive use of the Software that is not explicitly invoked by an individual such as CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), are not considered Active Interactive-use Users ("AIUs"). No additional fees are required for such uses.

I had to read it multiple times to understand the CI/CD bit. It's not clear to me whether the EULA says that CI/CD is an example of "use that is explicitly invoked by an individual" or if it's an example of "non-interactive use that is not explicitly invoked by an individual" - the wording is unclear to me and can have either of the opposite interpretations.

At my day job, we occasionally test C++ code changes by compiling in a CI/CD system to obtain a container image that we can push into a staging environment. This means we have a develop-compile-test cycle where the "compile" step involves pushing to a merge request branch, waiting for CI/CD to finish, and then running a deploy script to push out the newly-built image for testing. I wonder if this would be considered "Active Interactive-use Use" or not.

[1] https://github.com/bluewhalesystems/sold/blob/main/LICENSE.m...

> It's not clear to me whether the EULA says that CI/CD is an example of "use that is explicitly invoked by an individual"

I agree that it’s hard to interpret, but isn’t the whole point of CI/CD that developers don’t start builds explicitly? For example, your example doesn’t mention it. You push to a branch, then wait for the build to finish, but never explicitly start it.

So, it seems they want to allow free use in CI/CD setups. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other ways to implicitly invoke the linker. Your typical IDE may already do that when you click “Run” instead of “Build”. I can easily see a lawyer argue that running make qualifies as explicit invocation, too.

If we negate the wording in the EULA:

> non-interactive use of the Software that is not explicitly invoked by an individual

...then we get "use of the Software that is interactive or explicitly invoked by an individual".

I would say that running make to run sold to run/test/ship an executable, or clicking "Run" to invoke sold and test the app, or pushing a branch to run CI that runs sold to obtain an executable to run/test/ship, all easily should be considered to be AIU - after all, in all cases it's a person clicking a button (or typing a command), waiting for it to run, and then doing something with the result.

CI/CD setups are usually done on server farms, not on developer workstations. How many CI/CD setups are running on Macs? I'm guessing not many.

Many things that target macOS and everything that targets iOS will have a CI running on macOS.

For better or worse, iOS is not a niche target.

Interesting; they don't have a way to cross-compile? MacOS isn't really known for being a server OS...

No. And it's very intentional. You're not even legally allowed to run macOS VMs on non Apple hardware.

What's far worse than macOS not being a server OS is the hardware you're forced to contend with. Apple makes no server hardware. You end up with a disgusting hodgepodge of vendors making offerings that are largely redundancy in the way of massive falovers of mac minis. It's very unfortunate and makes self hosting or specifically (hardware or otherwise) needs extremely difficult.

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