Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

According to the LLVM lead dev (Chris Lattner on IRC), this is due to Apple's accountant's interpretation of SOX (Xcode 4 is too different from Xcode 3 to be considered an update, they see it as a new product):

> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh

Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.

View on HN

Here is the Wikipedia article on SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) for anyone that needs a refresher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act

It's SOX that's "weird", to put it mildly. I don't blame Apple for being paranoid about it.

Which part of SOX requires this?

I am not an Accountant and this isn't really an answer, but I will try to explain. Basically, it has to do with how you recognize money that you were paid. If I buy a MacBook for $999 and it comes with Xcode 3, and two years later, I get free major upgrades to the software, then the $999 I paid can't be recognized as revenue in the first year. It has to be spread out over the period of time that I will get free upgrades. If they charge me something for the upgrade, then they recongnize the $999 in year one, and the $4.99 two years later.

If this is all Apple is doing, expect Xcode 4 to be included in Lion. If it's not, they are simply charging for it now.

When you see token $.99 charges for things that should be free, this is the reason Apple does it. It's how they interpret the rules -- and, they are probably right. Since, there is no maintenance yearly charge, they can't keep delivering value to you for the initial price without spreading that money over the lifetime of the value delivery.

The great thing about Sarbanes-Oxley is that it is large enough to get away with blaming everything on it. Oh, you can say, my accounting team says Sarbanes-Oxley requires this 40% markup. Then if anybody actually calls you on it, you can refer them to their lawyer, who will charge them $15,000 to research the question. Since they can't read it either, they'll give you a maybe.

The real amusement to the law degrees, I'm sure, is that Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't really do anything and it's just a scare word, like Communism.

All kidding aside, just look at that lead-in on Wikipedia. I needed a shot at the end of that, and that's not even a section. I'm curious why this would be the case myself, and I'm still looking, a couple hours later. On a Wednesday night.

If this is true then I wonder if buying a new Mac or a boxed copy of Mac OS entitles one to XCode 4 and all updates until XCode 5 (which will be years away)?

That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.

I'm guessing it'll be Lion doing that, as with Facetime. And depending on the release time of Xcode 5 (and its synchronicity with OSX 10.8 or 10.9) and whatnot, Xcode 5 may very well be as "free" as 2.0 and 3.0 were.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com