[valuearb]

Homebrew and Macports maintainers could have easily reached out to Apple and gotten free DTKs to port with, just like thousands of other developers.

But the truth is that XCode built software is far more important to Mac users and that’s where Apples focus was. Homebrew users are less than 1% of their installed base.

The other truth is the M1 hadn’t been important to Homebrew maintainers. At least not yet.

[Wowfunhappy]

On the MacPorts side, I know that at least Saagar Jha (who posts on HN often) did indeed have a DTK. Perhaps consequently (?), MacPorts does support ARM right now.

[saagarjha]

I have very little to do with MacPorts's ARM support, I'm not even a maintainer ;) Most of that infrastructure was already there from the PowerPC→Intel transition, and Apple engineers had patches for basic support ready fairly quickly. I worked a little bit on early support for some heavily-depended-on packages, but I wasn't really directly involved in the effort.

[Wowfunhappy]

Whooops! I only mentioned you because I remembered you were listed on MacPorts's website until recently, as a contact for "Apple DTK issues" or something like that.

[saagarjha]

Ah, I remember adding myself to that page because I was trying to see if there was anyone else with one to help. The actual team is here: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsDevelopers

[ricketycricket]

DTKs were $500 USD, not free.

[armadsen]

I think he's suggesting that Apple would have donated them to Homebrew and MacPorts if they had asked. Seems extremely doubtful to me...

[callahad]

Apple offered free remote access to DTKs for open source developers, in cooperation with MacStadium.

Cite: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/3853#issuecomment-678249...

[mikemcquaid]

Apple did donate them to Homebrew without us asking. When we asked for more: they donated more.

[coldtea]

What's "doubtful"? Apple has done similar things in the past...