awmartin

You can do both. For OSS software though, it would need to be iPadOS apps built with Xcode or some cross-platform framework like Xamarin, but some time ago, Apple enabled anyone to install apps without a developer account.

Take a look at Cloud Foundry, especially the Container Runtime.

The Application Runtime (CFAR) is like an OSS Heroku, installable on AWS, GCP, Azure, vSphere, and OpenStack. Then just push your app and scale it out. It was first built as an enterprise Heroku competitor, and the commercial flavors power a bunch of big companies’ infrastructures. It even uses the same “buildpack” model that Heroku uses to provide language and framework dependencies.

The Container Runtime (CFCR) packages k8s in a way to make it easier to deploy, maintain, and scale, and it also deploys and manages the health of the underlying VMs. It originated in collaboration with Google.

Source: I’m a Cloud Foundry Foundation project lead.

The first advantage I see of Apple's support of Ruby is RubyOnRails developers may be able to create a Mac desktop auxiliary versions of their applications with less trouble (like Evernote: although I'm not sure if it's a Rails app, it does have desktop versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux fro offline use). Without Apple's support of Ruby, a company would of course need to hire Mac developers who know Objective-C.

I'm sure it's more complex than just that, but this does take down an entry barrier for me to developing for Macs. The next language on my list to learn is Python, so Objective-C was going to have to wait...