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Comment by mr_toad | Hacker News Reader

It didn’t take my kids long to learn how to run unsigned binaries, and neither of them are developers.

I've walked a couple hundred customers (American small business owners) through installing an unsigned MacOS application.There was plenty of friction for enough of them to cause us onboarding problems and for us to invest in doing it the Apple way.

A lot of it introduced from 2017 onwards and I think now it says something akin to "this application will hack your computer and is a virus" and you need to click the smaller hidden "ignore"s a few times to do what you want.

An actual customer won’t like it when you tell them they have to turn off or bypass a security feature to run your software. Not when other software doesn’t need it.

Once I get a project to "actual customers" I don't mind paying and signing my binaries.

This is something that definitely chafes. Even in a large-company enterprise environment, so many worthy & legitimate projects never end up shipping due to financial or office-politics reasons. Putting up paywalls between devs and their work that they to spend both time and money on is bloody stupid.

How about "actual users" rather than "actual customers?" We should not normalize this because it eats away at free software. It is totally unreasonable to have to pay the operating system's manufacturer in order for person A to simply distribute software to person B, outside of manufacturer's infrastructure. The manufacturer has nothing to do with that distribution, and has no business "warning" the user about this software.

You don’t have to pay to do that on MacOS, they can bypass the warning saying it’s unsigned and that the developer can’t be positively identified.

Apple should really provide free codesigning for free/open source software.

(almost) everyone has an SSL certificate for the web. An OS could check if software is signed with one. And maybe display a warning for only domain validation.

What does software being signed signify? Does it mean it's vetted? Can a malware author pay the $X and have their malware signed?

No, Apple will detect and suppress malware as part of the vetting process.

Ah, so they do vet? I didn't realize, thanks.

As much as I hate to submit to Apple having to Notarized my software, I have to admit that it’s a useful measure to detect and prevent malware. The end user is protected by Apple’s “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval.

Funny, I've never once in all my days installed malware from a Linux package manager, and this "seal of approval" doesn't cost me or the developer any money at all.

That’s because your computer is a hobby, and mine is a business. My customers use Windows and macOS. They have happily paid for my house, my car and my retirement. :o)

If you want to justify rent-seeking because it helps you pay for your lifestyle, come out and say so in the first place instead of pretending it's for the benefit of your users. But claiming that Linux is a "hobby" on HN is essentially trolling.

yet. everyone knows kids are good with getting around restrictions on computers, whether put there by their parents or otherwise.

kids will learn just about anything with the right motivation. adults who you are trying to get to pay you to use your software on the other hand...

well as someone who runs a few unsigned binaries myself. Its not hard if you know what to do but apple makes a big deal about how its "unsafe" and this freaks non tech people out.

Yes, but your kids have a technical parent, so chances are they both have significantly above-average intelligence.

I technically have two parents. How far up the smarts pole am I?

I should've said 'techie' parent. I assume most people knew what I meant.

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