> Homebrew doesn't ship any proprietary formulae at all. They have a clear policy against it:
And yet, I can install Sublime Text, Slack, and others through it out of the box. I just checked a couple more, Figma's there. Microsoft Office. Steam.
You used to have to run a one-liner to enable casks (just one, not one for every damn vendor like with apt) but not anymore.
Can't edit anymore, but just wanted to say: on review that post came off as snarkier than I intended it. I just mean that, whatever the policy on including closed-source in the primary Brew repo, casks are enabled by default and don't even require a different command or any set-up anymore. From a user's perspective they're 100% as available as other packages, as soon as you install homebrew. I think the only major difference is that they don't auto-update when you do a "brew upgrade"—you have to specify the cask package you want to upgrade. Which is a good policy since a lot of those programs have their own built-in updaters anyway.
Package stats from Repology seems to contradict this claim:
https://repology.org/repositories/graphs
It's not bad, but it's not the best either. Not even close.
> including tons of closed-source stuff
Homebrew doesn't ship any proprietary formulae at all. They have a clear policy against it:
> We don’t like binary formulae
> Our policy is that formulae in the core tap (homebrew/core) must be open-source with an Debian Free Software Guidelines license and either built from source or produce cross-platform binaries (e.g. Java, Mono). Binary-only formulae should go to homebrew/cask.
> Additionally, homebrew/core formulae must also not depend on casks or any other proprietary software.
> This includes automatic installation of casks at runtime.
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Acceptable...