Homebrew is pleased to congratulate Workbrew on their 1.0 launch today. Workbrew is a company founded by several Homebrew members and the Project Leader, @MikeMcQuaid, to use Homebrew as the foundation of a secure software delivery platform. Workbrew’s product is out of beta and ready to solve your workplace’s problems with securing Homebrew at scale, so go check it out!

We understand that the community will, rightly, have questions. You’ll find some answers below. This relationship is mutually beneficial: Workbrew employees work on Homebrew during working hours, and Workbrew sponsors Homebrew on GitHub Sponsors. Workbrew’s founders care deeply about the success and independence of Homebrew.

Homebrew itself is and will always remain open source and free (as in speech and beer 🍺).

Homebrew and Workbrew FAQs

Homebrew is an open source project and part of the non-profit Open Source Collective run by unpaid volunteers (bar a small $300/month stipend for opted-in active maintainers).

Workbrew is a product (with paid tiers) and company run by founders and employees.

At the time of writing, some of Homebrew and Workbrew’s leadership overlap (@MikeMcQuaid, @mozzadrella) and Workbrew employs some Homebrew maintainers (@Bo98, @carlocab).

Is Workbrew in control of Homebrew?

No. Homebrew has an independent governance structure that can only be changed through a supermajority of votes cast. Homebrew’s Project Leadership Committee (PLC) restricts any employer (including Workbrew) from holding more than 2 seats on the PLC.

Additionally, on the code side, Homebrew is BSD-2 licensed with no CLA and >10,000 contributors.

In practice, this means that neither Homebrew or Workbrew could relicense Homebrew without >10,000 people agreeing to it (or their code being rewritten) which is essentially impossible.

Is Workbrew going to make us pay for Homebrew?

No. Only Homebrew could decide to do this and we have no plans to do so. Workbrew includes Homebrew and charges money for certain Workbrew plans - as permitted by Homebrew’s license - but cannot ever make Homebrew not open source.

Did Homebrew know this was coming?

Yes. Workbrew kept Homebrew’s leadership, maintainers and membership in the loop from early in the company’s conception. We’re very grateful for this transparency.