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Comment by jankassens | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they charge for the tools to develop on their platform.

Charging for the forums/bug tracker is probably a good way to keep people out who aren't that serious about development, but I don't get why they charge for XCode. It's not like they'd make any relevant amount of money off XCode.

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To be fair, this is a $5 fee for a full-featured version of their development tools. Compare that to the cost of a full-featured Visual Studio.

One difference is that MS also has a free command-line compiler.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/ http://llvm.org/releases/download.html

gcc/clang are completely open source. In fact, the ones online are far more recent versions than what apple has been shipping. I believe apple still ships gcc42 as of the last free xcode.

That's because GCC has changed licensing to GPLv3, and Apple didn't like that. So they left with last GPLv2 version.

Are there really that many compelling additions to gcc since then? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one.

the optimizers are significantly better, enhanced profiling, standards compliance more strict, c++0x additions, and improved compile times.

free as in beer, not your rights

VS is also free to students and small businesses.

I think non-iOS/OSX developers probably still make up a large number of their MacBook(Pro) customers. And perhaps moreso now with their new version.

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