An M1 for Curl
I am always amazed at the generosity of some people who use free/open-source software. It definitely makes me want to try and become more supportive to such efforts myself.
I make a (closed-source but completely free/ad-free) minimal macOS app for Hue, and every other day (sometimes a week goes by) I get a lovely price-of-a-coffee-sized donation from someone in the community. And when I ask for their name to include them in a credits or supporters panel, most don't even want me to mention it or credit them.
One time, I struggled to replicate an issue for which I didn't have the necessary hardware (multiple Hue bridges), and the bug reporter simply offered to buy and send me "a bunch of bridges and lights" to make debugging easier. I couldn't accept it, but it's gestures like that, combined with positive feedback from people wanting the project to keep going and succeed, that are such a tremendous motivational driver for working on "free stuff". I had totally underestimated that (coming from the SaaS side).
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.
I’d like to post the Apple GitHub account where you can find quite a few repositories Apple is developing open source for not only Apple platforms. They even just announced that the new Swift native Foundation framework will be completely open source. I think that’s pretty significant.
I'm surprised the performance stats weren't more dramatic. Is the compilation not taking advantage of multiple cores? Or for this task is the m1 really do comparable to an Intel 3rd gen cpu?
If you're looking to support open source projects, Open Collective has a workable model: https://opencollective.com/curl
If you want your employer to contribute, check your expense policy. Most companies have a threshold below which you don't need a receipt or even explicit approval. At my last company, that was $50 so I convinced Daniel (of curl) to add a $25/month level specifically to take advantage of it. :)
I have no relationship with Apple, but from my experience, the usual way big corp contributes to open source is to have their engineers sending patches, instead of sponsoring money/hardware directly.
For example Apple sent patches to some open source projects to add support for Apple Silicon: https://twitter.com/markvillacampa/status/127520044676491264...
“I expected the differences to be bigger” is some serious shade!
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Apple gave me a G4 once when I was contributing to Darwin but, that was a long time ago and the culture may have changed. However I suspect if you had an existing relationship with an engineer there, they'd throw some surplus hardware your way.
The most amazing thing in that article is: "The source code is stored on an OCZ-VERTEX4 SSD on the Intel,"
That must be the only surviving OCZ Vertex4 in existence.
Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem?
Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem so it's not possible to engage with them in a reasonable manner.
They don't acknowledge popular open source projects. Is it too much to ask to even have a single engineer talk to popular projects like Homebrew?
They make us pay to build on their platforms. CI is more expensive, harder to get access to. Emulation is prohibited.
Everywhere I look, it looks like they are a negative force. Sucking out good will and not giving anything back.
Since the author mentions there are many users of curl on Apple platforms, there should be a pool of engineers from which a volunteer could be found to help out.
The author didn't mention reaching out to Apple for help? My opinion is if Apple documentation call out the use of curl as part of a workflow or enabling step, or actually as part of a product, then there is a moral duty to help out (not a legal or license duty).
I would prefer to see the big tech companies contribute to a foundation who could redistribute funds to key open source groups. A credit for a cloud instance of the machine would be sufficient in most cases. It would also remove undue influence of one vendor over another. Maybe such a thing exists, and I would welcome if someone pointed it out.
> Apple has shipped and used curl in their products for twenty years but they never assist, help or otherwise contribute to the development. They also don’t sponsor us in any way, like with hardware.
Do they have an obligation to? Even a moral one? Honestly I don't think (I hope!) Apple actually uses curl in their products (probably a good thing). It's just provided as a convenience to developers who might be used to it.
I got curious about Apple's use of Curl and Googled it. One of the top hits was another blog post complaining about Apple not donating Macs:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-ye...
I think you could replace 99% of the uses of Curl (download one file via HTTPS) with like 100 lines of Python or Rust or Go. It's not critical infrastructure in the same way that OpenSSL or LLVM or WebKit are.