Well, the flip side is that the CocoaPods developers are all volunteers (right?). They aren't really deriving any benefit out of the work they do on CocoaPods, and if you ask them to take on financial or ongoing maintenance obligations for a volunteer project, they probably just won't do it. The major benefits of CocoaPods existence go to iOS developers, but there's a tragedy of the commons effect here, where no individual developer is willing to pony up money for the extra convenience that CocoaPods offers.
I think that long-term, the solution will be the Swift Package Manager, and CocoaPods will just be deprecated in favor of it. Let Apple host iOS packages; they're the ones that gain the most benefit from easy iOS development; they have the developer expertise, and the hosting costs are a drop in the bucket compared to iCloud & CloudKit. But that's not all that helpful for people who need an Objective-C package now.
> They aren't really deriving any benefit out of the work they do on CocoaPods
I don't think working on CocoaPods is an altruistic endeavor. I imagine (know) that some of the cocoapods folks are app developers and ostensibly CocoaPods makes developing applications easier.
Side Note: its not a tragedy of the commons. Github owns the infrastructure and they enforced their private property rights by rate limiting a group of users that were disproportionately using resources. It is a collective action problem for CP users.
Presumably - otherwise they wouldn't be doing it - but it often doesn't take all that much to flip a volunteer from "Okay, this is cool, I can help other people and learn some stuff as well" to "Fuck this, it's way more trouble than it's worth." Top amongst this is when the people you're helping expect you to give them free work.
Jobs compete with other jobs, and most people expect that they'll have to do some unpleasant things in their job. Open-source & volunteer work competes with hobbies, and there are many hobbies where you never need to deal with demands, unexpected work, and interpersonal drama.
It also doesn't take much to move a company from "Okay, we'll help you by hosting your shit for free" to "Fuck you, you're banned since you are ungrateful bastards" (in nicer language of course).
I agree, and I think the GitHub employees who commented on the thread have been really patient, and that it's impressive that GitHub as a company has tolerated and supported this use case.
My point, though, is that it's not the CocoaPods developers who are ungrateful bastards. It's any Hacker News commenter here who also uses CocoaPods. If you think this behavior is insane, submit a pull request.
Ugh, I'm skeptical of giving Apple ownership of any kind of developer tool. We all saw how badly they screwed up TestFlight, and now you want to give them the only OSS package manager?
Amen to that. Fortunately the Swift Package manager (Which is also OSS) is ran by their open source swift team who so far is doing a great job of being open and delivering the best solutions for the job.
Haven't tried HockeyApp. I use Crashlytics Beta now and it's amazing. Literally "press of a button" deployment: no dealing with provisioning profiles, device UUIDs, or any of that garbage. Just build and deploy, and all your testers get the update instantly!
I think that long-term, the solution will be the Swift Package Manager, and CocoaPods will just be deprecated in favor of it. Let Apple host iOS packages; they're the ones that gain the most benefit from easy iOS development; they have the developer expertise, and the hosting costs are a drop in the bucket compared to iCloud & CloudKit. But that's not all that helpful for people who need an Objective-C package now.