What price, other than $0, would be acceptable for a tool that took years of effort by a team of programmers and cost Apple tens of millions in programmer's salaries to develop?
If you can't see this, I don't really know what to say. Apple literally makes billions of dollars on software, you'd think they'd throw the developers that literally helped build their ecosystem a freaking bone. I suppose that's too much to ask from Apple.
Cue the "vote with your wallet", "no one is forcing you to use it" rabble...
Can you clarify the $5-hurts-FOSS argument? I don't mean to sound crass, but there are people who pay more than $5 for coffee. If a one-time charge of $5 to build OS X versions of your FOSS project is a, as you say, "[sizable] obstacle" to entering FOSS development, that's a genuine surprise to me. Especially since Xcode 3 is still absolutely free. If I were a committer on your project I'd buy it myself and donate it, for crying out loud.
They anticipated this, undoubtedly, and put the button right there: "Looking for Xcode 3 because $5 is too much? Here it is!" You're really only paying for the improved GUI. Does your FOSS project use Xcode as its primary development platform, or is it just using the compiler toolchain?
This revolt to $5 is absolutely stunning. Even more worth thinking about is that all the commenting about it on HN equates to far more than $5 in billable time...how many copies could the revolting have purchased?
All this for what? A paltry $10 million or so for Apple which is already rolling in tens of bilions of cash(partly thanks to developers, you always see Jobs touting the app count). Is it even worth it for Apple?
The company is smacking of greed and squeezing the last dollar these days with all these moves like a forced 30% cut of services and now this, which can damage the ecosystem.
>No, cue the you're assuming you won't get Xcode 4 with Lion rabble.
That makes it even worse, Apple can't be making more than $5 million from this.
There's no real reason to rage about this, other than a self-created illusion that the only thing stopping some hypothetical FOSS developer somewhere in Romania from creating the next Apache is the inability to pay Apple 5 dollars.
It's amusing how any time Apple does something like this the apologists come out of the woodwork falling over each other to defend them.