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Comment by jon6 | Hacker News Reader

OT but is this an official signed application that can work with gatekeeper on 10.8? I recently discovered that my open source project won't work by default on osx 10.8 without me paying $99 to get an apple certificate, which I'm not very interested in doing.

What are open source/free projects supposed to do about gatekeeper?

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> What are open source/free projects supposed to do about gatekeeper?

They're supposed to pay up.

The signing Developer Certificate Utility at https://developer.apple.com/certificates/ rejects accounts that are not paid members of the Mac Developer Program, and a footnote at https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/ states that "Mac Developer Program membership is required to access the tools and resources for distributing Mac applications."

Tell users how to turn it off. I've never seen a user object to doing so, possibly because they don't understand what it's doing in the first place.

You don't have to turn it off. Just Command click the application and click open the first time. It's automatically added to a whitelist.

I disabled Gatekeeper's hollering on 10.8. I suspect most power users will do the same, but I have no data for that suspicion.

"Power Users" can have the best of both worlds by simply right-clicking and selecting "Open" to whitelist specific non-signed apps that they want to trust.

I'd mostly expect people who turn it off entirely to fit the "don't really know what they're doing but like to do whatever a forum post tells them to do" archetype.

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