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Comment by glassx | Hacker News Reader

> I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler.

They fixed that. On newer OS X versions you can download the Command Line Tools (just 110mb) from Apple's website. You just need a free account: https://developer.apple.com/downloads

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Why do I need a free account? What is the purpose of that?

I get a compiler from BSD, which is the source of Apple's code, without needing any account. Apple didn't need an account to get that code from BSD. Apple seems to do a disservice to the notion of the BSD license, which is not to impose restrictions on people (e.g. making them get a developer "account").

Haven't you heard? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from a surveillance state in which even your use of a compiler is closely monitored and tagged.

Apple's current C compiler, clang, did not originate in the BSD project, but is primarily developed by Apple itself.

This is a good point. Although that word "primarily" is interesting.

Is Clang BSD-licensed?

It's UIUC's license, which looks similar to BSD to me. They also have some MIT licensed code. http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license

Essentially, yes. It's NCSA-OSL which is based on MIT, which is based on BSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

Many projects use Clang/LLVM for their OpenCL implementations.

"primarily", because the LLVM / clang project had its origins in academia (before the project and its team got acqui-hired by Apple), and because the project is open source, and thus still gets some amount of community contributions (probably not a huge proportion of the overall effort, though).

It sounds like you need a reminder that OS X is not based on BSD, it's a different operating system that had a lot of BSD stuff grafted on to the side of it - like Windows, but moreso. Also, BSD doesn't provide a compiler - they use GNU's compiler, and are switching to Apple's compiler.

Yes, I did need that reminder. Memory is failing today. But... does it change my question? GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account".

OSX is not BSD, but there's no way it could even think about calling itself "UNIX" and getting certified as such without all the BSD code they took.

What else is OS X? It's a kernel from CMU. And whiz bang graphics. And lots of annoyances.

> GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account".

What an outrageous thing... They force you to create a free account that wastes quite literally 6 minutes of your time... It's unacceptable, how dare they??!!1 (<-- sarcasm)

And if I may add, I hate the fact that I have to put credit card information on this free account.

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