Hacker News Reader

Comment by _vxgq | Hacker News Reader

The perspective is that it is a free project shared on Github which prompts a OS-level warning message on macOS, which might certainly intimidate some people.

I really want to see this project succeed, and thus gave feedback on this — what else is a "Show HN" good for, then?

View on HN

But you're raising the alarm over a standard expectation which suggests an unfamiliarity with the norms here. It's like you're confusing it with an anti-virus alert. They already know about the warning since that's what all software does on macOS until it's notarized.

For them to avoid that Gatekeeper warning, they would have to pay Apple $100 and then notarize their executable through Apple for their hobby project with 30 commits.

This isn't something we'd expect OP to do for this project.

Also the Gatekeeper warning is kind of a norm among developer tools. You can see it in much more popular projects. Just today `brew install --cask syncthing` triggered it when I went to open it. You're trying to be helpful but I hope you find this comment helpful as well.

Finally, all of that is beside the issue of digging up someone's linkedin profile and pseudonyms for the crime of sharing a tool with us that wasn't notarized with a $100 Apple permission slip.

A lack of such a prompt would mean nothing from security point of view. It's not like you run a program you used regularly and now all of a sudden such a warning appears (as if someone replaced the program's binary with another one). You did download this program manually from the internet, the warning is basically just about that.

Yes, but the target group of this project is not "me". It's potentially many people, and I assume (maybe incorrectly) that the author wants their project to succeed and gain traction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com