CoreML being a phone feature, then restricting it behind a paywall sounds like something customers would sue apple for. CoreML is already bundled in the price you pay when you purchase an iPhone. It will only work as a cloud service.
>then restricting it behind a paywall sounds like something customers would sue apple for
Slightly difference scenario here but I feel it's similar. In my last job my company bought a system from Oracle that did a bunch of number crunching for processing images to be printed. As I understood it, Oracle charged for utilizing more cores, even though it was an on premise system and everything was already in the box ready to go.
If Apple, or anyone, makes hardware and wants to charge a license to use said hardware, isn't that legal? This sounds like BMW charging a license for their heated seats. The hardware is already there and ready to go, but is behind a paywall.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170848
Many walled gardens, growing different plants, landscaped in different styles, with different admission fees, but ultimately conforming to basic principles and paying their dues to the Apple botanical society.
Apple Authorized App Merchants.
In an ideal world? Nothing. Apple builds these APIs because they want people to use them, not because they expect a return on their investment. We established that precedent when Google litigated Oracle so many years back.
Of course, Apple will claim they need whatever they can get. Their lack of candid conversation with the community is exactly why we need to respond by taking away their taxman hat.
Xcode is free, though. Apple 'takes their cut' when you pay $99/year to be a registered Apple developer. If that's not enough, then maybe they need to review the checkbook again. Whatever the case is, Apple made a mistake by attaching the success of their software platform to the success of their App Store. The future of the internet was never going to be proprietary, they should have known that back when Microsoft was sued over IE. It's not illegal, but they're certainly teeing themselves up for the most radical antitrust scrutiny witnessed to-date.
It's just a dick move. Consumer advocacy groups should have fixed this by now, but Apple's legendary PR and reality distortion field has fended off most attacks so far.
Unreal Engine is "free" too.
Except it isn't. Neither Unreal Engine nor Apple's developer frameworks (shipped alongside Xcode) are public domain or copyleft. They're both proprietary code available under a license that permits certain usages, disallows certain usages, is royalty free under some conditions, and requires payment under other conditions.
> Apple 'takes their cut' when
That's not for you to decide. Epic can decide when to take money from developers who use Unreal Engine, and how much they're entitled to. It's equally Apple's decision which payment represents compensation for the developer's use of their intellectual property, and how much they're entitled to.
You're confusing free with libre. Apple's software and Unreal are free as in "free beer".
I'm not confusing them. The fact that they are not libre is precisely the point I was making. They are both proprietary intellectual property and encumber the person using them with financial obligations under some conditions.
> Apple's software and Unreal are free as in "free beer".
No, they are not. They're free as in "free beer when consumed on our premises, max five per customer, and if you sell our free beer to someone else we'll take some of that revenue thank you very much".
Right, and my point is that it's not free as in beer.
But it is. Being free as in "free beer" has nothing to do with being or not being public domain or copyleft.
Public domain or copyleft refer to free as in "free speech".
Tell that to Epic Games' department of license revenue.
Edit:
In Epic's case the tools remain free as in beer. There's no additional cost to using them.
Epic applies a fee to what you produce with them, and even then:
> A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt.
If you were to distribute your product for free (as you want), you wouldn't pay Epic a single cent.
If you want to lump that in with free as in beer because Epic isn't taking money from people who haven't made something particularly profitable, okay, but I don’t think many people would agree with you.
(It's also free-as-in-you're-part-of-their-marketing-strategy. Widespread "free" use of Unreal Engine helps build developer experience with Unreal Engine, increasing the availability of relevant skills in the job market, and making its use more attractive when it comes time to start a big, highly profitable project.)
Your attempt to somehow conflate it with someone's business models are laughable at best. All software comes with strings attached. And the biggest one is: even people who distribute software for free still have a business to run and mouths to feed.
Or indeed that post's parent, where a different opinion was offered about when a license for CoreML libraries was paid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905596
Or its parent, the one which initially defined the scope of the discussion, which was "...Apple charging a license for the frameworks and tooling they provide..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905555
Not about the Xcode IDE itself which I agree is free-as-in-beer. (Though others might disagree — an argument could be made that it was paid for the purchase of a relevant Apple hardware product; the fact that it wasn't pre-installed being a mere technicality.)
That's strange people think as it's providing some kind of "value" which needs to be paid, in reality it's the opposite, it's a problematic byproduct of the monopoly which I would get rid of given the choice.
Under the hood it uses clang, which was developed with Apple support and which I guess has some value…
Clang was a community project, same as LLVM. Apple came along and threw money at it because of FOMO (very similar to CUPS) and eventually a XNU toolchain followed. Apple didn't really provide any value beyond support that already existed for FOSS operating systems.