Re: Mac OS X Catalina 64-bit compile ?

[Hans Aikema]

On 30 May 2020, at 12:41, Wim van Dommelen <mail@wimvd.nl> wrote:
> 
> 
> But when I then browse around a little bit to get some feeling of what this 
> platform is, whether it is something I could use, I see a button "Pricing" 
> ($150/month?, Open Source registration in the bottom), "Sign in", "Start your 
> free trial", etc. That gets me feel a little uncomfortable. Is this wrapping 
> everything, where will we end?
> 
> Regards,
> Wim.

Wim,

A bit late to the discussion, but spotted that this concern of yours was not 
yet addressed. As a developer that is familiar with this website I would like 
to explain that there is nothing to worry about regarding the download.

The website that Karlin referred you to is JFrog’s BinTray website and that’s 
what Marnen uses to distribute the binaries. JFrog and it’s BinTray website are 
well-known names in the developer community. BinTray is a well-knwon platform 
that offers a service to distribute binares to software developers so that they 
don’t have to worry about scaling hosting to make sure you can handle massive 
download-volumes and have sufficient disk space to store your various binaries. 
The ’sign-up for 150/month’ is the sign-up for their commercial software 
distribution account offering and is unrelated to the Lilypond binary itself.

If at any point in future JFrog would stop offering its BinTray services I’m 
sure that Marnen will be able to find a new distribution site alternative.

Of course it would be even better if Apple Inc. would open up it’s 64-bit SDK 
license so that it could be directly used by Lilypond in its build process to 
provide an official 64-bit Mac OS binary. The current license requires Apple 
hardware to use the SDK which raises concerns for a free (as in freedom) 
software package using the GNU license.
For now we as users have to rely on the (much appreciated) efforts of Marnen 
Laibow-Koser (producing the bintray-hosted ‘unofficial’ binaries) and Hans 
Åberg (posting here every now and then a link to a lilypond binary installer 
built by MacPorts) as the only alternatives to self-building from source (with 
or without the use of packages like HomeBrew / MacPorts).

The end result of long threads of discussion was that Marnen has taken up an 
effort to work on automated  binaries for Mac OS 64-bit [1] which are nowadays 
getting linked from the (English) download page [2] as ‘unofficial’ binaries as 
a convenience for use by users that do not want to build the software from 
source (either all by themselves, or by using tools such as HomeBrew or 
MacPorts). The fact that 2.21.x binaries are not yet present clearly show that 
the automation is still a work-in-progress.

So all-in-all your main concern regarding the future should be with Apple Inc.: 
They have over time restricted the allowed use of their SDK to a scenario that 
makes it hard for "free software” (as in freedom) developers to build binaries 
for their platform as there is no 64-bit version of the SDK available to embed 
in a cross-platform build environment that is allowed to be run on non-Apple 
hardware. The 32-bit binaries can still be built because they use an older, 
32-bit only, version of the SDK from when it was still more liberally licensed.

regards,
Hans Aikema

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2020-03/msg00042.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2020-03/msg00777.html