Can anyone think of the reason Apple wouldn't provide hardware support to curl and similar projects?
To my mind "this dev tool doesn't work, only on Apple, only on Apple's flagship chips" is the opposite of what they'd like to see happen.
To my mind "this dev tool doesn't work, only on Apple, only on Apple's flagship chips" is the opposite of what they'd like to see happen.
If I wanted to donate $50 to a single person who has developed a critical bit of open source we as a company gas relied on for ten years, it would be a major hassle.
There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.
You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept)
When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)
From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery.
Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.
I wish we could just buy licenses sometimes ... I really hate fucking around with procurement processes
> We don't donate to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not allowed to.
> I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to quote me a commercial license of their project, with the explanation that I would accept a quote of $1,000 and that the commercial license can be their existing OSS license plus an invoice. My books suggest we've spent $3k on this in 2015. My bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS/NTA are united on this issue: they don't care whether a software license is OSS or not. A $1k invoice is a $1k invoice; as a software company, I have virtually carte blanche to expense any software I think is reasonably required, and I think our OSS is reasonably required.
> I would do this more often if OSS projects made it easier for me to do so. Getting me to pay $1,000 for software is easy; committing me to doing lots of admin work over the course of a week is less easy. Take a look at what e.g. http://sidekiq.org/ , which is an OSS project with a commercial model, does. Two clicks gets me to a credit card form. If I actually used Sidekiq, Mike would have had my credit card on file the day that form went up.
Of course, Patio11 was running his own show, and a larger company might demand more, but it is worth asking.
1. For the given amount of $5000 for the period 2023-01-01 to 2023-12-31 you are entitled to
2. Create a feature or bug request on our support system
3. Have a first response back in 96h
4. No warranties explicit or implicit that we'll be able to solve your problem blah blah blah etc
Way too risky.
But yeah, it should be in their best interest to reach out directly to the developers of software like curl, zsh, git, Python... Everything they've been shipping as a part of their OS for 20+ years.
Remember, Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison who famously said that open source is there to be exploited. These guys all think the same way.
There are plenty of licenses which are free only for non-commercial use. The author choose the “free for all” license for a reason though.
> Yet, there are many curl users on the different Apple platforms and sometimes these users run into issues that are unique to those platforms and are challenging to address without direct access to such.
In other words, it's to Apple's own detriment if the author of curl doesn't have access to Apple hardware.
curl is offered for free, and the consequence of that is the author of curl is under no obligation to support Apple platforms or shell out money for Apple hardware.
First sentence of the article: "A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development."
Edit - Looking at https://opencollective.com/curl, the project received $64,000 in donations, and the developer is employed, full-time, by a company to work on cURL. You'd have slightly more of a point if this were not the case, however as it stands it looks like a whine about Apple.
If you read the other comments on this submission, it's not just my opinion.
> Doesn't make it any more (or less) valid than the question I'm posing; why is the developer entitled to Apple providing hardware for testing?
That's the wrong question. The developer is not entitled to Apple hardware and never claimed to be entitled.
The issue is explained in my earlier comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183736
To repeat myself:
> Yet, there are many curl users on the different Apple platforms and sometimes these users run into issues that are unique to those platforms and are challenging to address without direct access to such.
In other words, it's to Apple's own detriment if the author of curl doesn't have access to Apple hardware.
curl is offered for free, and the consequence of that is the author of curl is under no obligation to support Apple platforms or shell out money for Apple hardware.
> You develop software for MacOS, do you expect a free Mac?
This is a straw man. Apple does not ship my software with macOS, unlike curl. Also, I make money selling Mac software, unlike curl.
You can only use it for iOS apps if you have Apple hardware. I am one of the maintainers and thankfully I got a Mac Mini donated as well when I lost my company Mac.
Any time you see a behemoth like Apple not doing something it's because they don't want to.
They don't consider whatever gains they get from it to be worth the time and money.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...
But it's a big company, so presumably some team used curl for some project, leaked that in an error message, and whoever runs the Apple Support social media account apparently didn't know about that after someone contacted them about the error message. Or something like that, it's hard to figure out what was going on without more context.