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Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

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Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#381

Post by merijnv »

rbarooah wrote: post #246
merijnv wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, HN seems to also attract a lot of people like me who just want to hack, entrepreneurial nonsense be damned. And I will gladly make my software free and "throw away" all the profit I could make, because I believe I am contributing to a better world.

Not sure why merijnv was downvoted - seems like a pretty reasonable point of view to me. May I ask how you fund your activities?

As of yet I'm a student (nearly finished with my masters in CS), so most of my work is either research related code or things I write in my spare time. I mostly fund my activities from my part-time sys admin job (which is rather low intensity, so I can do some coding during slow times.)

I plan on starting on a PhD when I'm done, and basically continue like this. How I continue to fund this after the protective bubble of academia I haven't really considered yet, but that's a few years of for now anyway.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#382

Post by zcid »

jamroom wrote: post #279
zcid wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updates have always been automatic through Software Update. I have never manually downloaded an update for Xcode. I have been a staunch Apple supporter for years, but lately their anti-hacker stance has become more and more obvious. If you aren't making them money through their store, then fuck off. This token charge for Xcode isn't for profit; it's a message to a certain group saying "You aren't wanted here anymore.…

In over 2 years I've never once seen Xcode update through Software Update - is there a secret setting somewhere to enable it? I'm ready to plunk down the $4.99 just to get the automatic update in the App store. Thanks!

I'm pretty sure it does. I'll use this as a reference:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2009/Nov/msg0042...

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#383

Post by godDLL »

earino wrote: post #359
pyre wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that this: You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. Applies everywhere in the world? Or is it only people in certain countries that matter?

Only people in certain countries matter. Most of the world just pirates software.

That is cruel and incorrect. People pirate software everywhere.

Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at, and the dance of getting-that-$5-into-Apple's-pocket can cost you more than that in time and effort alone.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#384

Post by masklinn »

mambodog wrote: post #323
masklinn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

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.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#385

Post by gtani »

rbanffy wrote: post #365
msbarnett wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had in mind Visual Studio Express (heavily crippled vs the purchased editions), the commercial Ada and Lisp IDEs whose free versions have onerous limitations, etc. There's a lot out there beyond the java IDEs. And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problem…

Neither Eclipse nor NetBeans can be called Java IDEs more than Emacs can be called a Lisp IDE. I develop in Python under Eclipse and I prefer Eclipse for general Java development. I prefer NetBeans for JavaME stuff and I absolutely love Emacs for Python, but there are things that Eclipse + Pydev do better (specially App Engine stuff). For what I know, the support for Roby and Rails in NetBeans is also very good. Of c…

python IDE's/text editor/whatevers: komodo Edit (the full $300 version) works very nicely for perl/python/ruby (never tried tcl), if you get somebody to buy if for you (no BizSpark that i can see).

I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well.

http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C...

XCode Pricing: kinda like pinboard.in at $9.26, just enough to deter somebody from buying, for whatever reason.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#386

Post by rbanffy »

gtani wrote: post #385
rbanffy wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Eclipse nor NetBeans can be called Java IDEs more than Emacs can be called a Lisp IDE. I develop in Python under Eclipse and I prefer Eclipse for general Java development. I prefer NetBeans for JavaME stuff and I absolutely love Emacs for Python, but there are things that Eclipse + Pydev do better (specially App Engine stuff). For what I know, the support for Roby and Rails in NetBeans is also very good. Of c…

python IDE's/text editor/whatevers: komodo Edit (the full $300 version) works very nicely for perl/python/ruby (never tried tcl), if you get somebody to buy if for you (no BizSpark that i can see). I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well. http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C... XCode Pricing: kinda lik…

You do realize it is hard to find a list of IDEs to compete in favorable terms with the free (as in speech) ones, don't you?

There is a reason why Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, Eric and so many others compare favorably, if not blow their competition out of the water: it's because some of the developers who use them give back and improve them.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#387

Post by misterm »

nitrogen wrote: post #278
mechanical_fish wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love emacs and use it every day. And I'm glad that it's free software. But if Apple offered to keep my Mac's emacs install up to date for $4.99 I would pay in a heartbeat. I have to periodically check whether my version is out of date. When it is, I have to find the download URL, click on it, remember to come back when the package has downloaded, and run the installer. I have to do this on all of my machines. Sure,…

Just curious, I'm assuming that switching to Linux to get automatic updates for all packages would cost you more than $5 in pain in other areas. Is that assumption correct?

I switched from windows to linux as my main OS a little while back. Currently, I run only linux, but I have previously run a dual boot setup with windows 7. That was just a speedbump.

Now, if I want to update anything I type the following in the command line:

sudo apt-get udpdate sudo apt-get upgrade

... And that is all. Unless you meant some other kind of pain and suffering?

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#388

Post by loumf »

albertsun wrote: post #351
masklinn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

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.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#389

Post by rbarooah »

merijnv wrote: post #381
rbarooah wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why merijnv was downvoted - seems like a pretty reasonable point of view to me. May I ask how you fund your activities?

As of yet I'm a student (nearly finished with my masters in CS), so most of my work is either research related code or things I write in my spare time. I mostly fund my activities from my part-time sys admin job (which is rather low intensity, so I can do some coding during slow times.) I plan on starting on a PhD when I'm done, and basically continue like this. How I continue to fund this after the protective bubble…

Thanks for being so open. Like you, I would love to just hack on things that make the world a better place. Unlike you I don't have a protective environment from which to do so. I have to fund myself somehow.

It would be a lot easier to do this if people were generally willing to give a few dollars for things that were arguably far more valuable to them than a cup of coffee, but sadly the 'software should be free' meme undermines that.

I think that a general acceptance that software is worth a little bit rather than free would allow more people to hack for the benefit of the world. I think the free model benefits those who are well funded from other sources, further concentrating power in the hands of the well off.

Obviously I'd like a unicorn as well, but maybe two wishes is too much to ask for.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#390

Post by rbarooah »

tensor wrote: post #68
randrews wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Putting it on the App Store seems perfectly normal, but charging money for something that used to be free, even a token amount, is a really stupid thing to do. $5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher. Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 g…

The cynic in me thinks that it's $10 this year, $15 the next, and pretty soon Apple will be doing what Microsoft used to do. If so, it's a real shame. I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your syste…

Except that the price of their other software (iWork, Aperture, OSX) has even falling dramatically.
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