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> As I understand it, 30% pays for all of the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode, as well as everything involved with running the store, and they take their cut when you post on their store and sell stuff.

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.

> Xcode is free, though.

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.

> Neither Unreal Engine nor Apple's developer frameworks (shipped alongside Xcode) are public domain or copyleft.

You're confusing free with libre. Apple's software and Unreal are free as in "free beer".

> You're confusing free with libre.

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".

The comment you were replying to wasn't talking about free as in speech. They were talking about free as in beer. And the whole thread talks about money and cost. Not their source code availability.

> They were talking about free as in beer.

Right, and my point is that it's not free as in beer.

> 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".

> But it is.

Tell that to Epic Games' department of license revenue.

"Free as in beer" only concerns itself with the price of the distributed software.

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.

Yes, I know what Epic's business model is. As with many software libraries, it's free as in “first sign this contract, do some stuff with our stuff, then later we shall decide how much you owe us”.

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.)

You keep piling more and more unrelated things onto a very simple concept. "Free as in beer" literally talks just about the cost of distributed software. That's it.

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.

I see where you're confused. You might well have a valid point if the discussion was about the Xcode IDE or whatever developer tools are supplied alongside Unreal Engine. That's not what the discussion was relating to. Per the great great great great great great great grandparent's post, the discussion was referring to "...the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905694

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.)

I don't want to use xcode either, their tooling is terrible and the only reason I use it is because of Apple intentionally obfuscating their build and release process.

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.

Just compile with command line tools and use any editor you want. The xcodebuild command line tool, which is distinct from Xcode lest there’s any confusion, is pretty well documented.

Under the hood it uses clang, which was developed with Apple support and which I guess has some value…

> 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.

In name it was a community project. Chris Lattner was an Apple employee and it was his job. After which he also started Swift…

In a different world, Apple would embrace alternate app stores- by having them operate on their own terms.

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.

Nice idea, thought it would presumably shift the dispute over platform fees to a dispute over "Apple botanical society dues."

That is true. I wonder what the payment structure is for Apple Authorized Service Providers or Apple Authorized Resellers. The economics definitely change when it comes to software. Consider a hypothetical iOS version of F-Droid: if such a third party store doesn't charge developers to host their apps, what kind of dues do they owe upstream? Apple would still claim that F-iOS is benefiting from the app distribution APIs and security features they're providing, not to mention updates to iOS itself.

> if such a third party store doesn't charge developers to host their apps, what kind of dues do they owe upstream?

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.