Calling Apple out - Make dev material free.

I'm a windows developer and I'd just like to call out the recent evilness coming from Apple. I received an email encouraging me to watch the WWDC08 session videos. I excitedly clicked the link^ where they attempted to charge me for the video sessions.

Microsoft doesn't charge for this type of material now-a-days and I was expecting the same from Apple. Big conferences like the PDC2008 are free^^. And of course there are plenty of free conference materials in other domains (Java, python and ruby).

So what's up with Apple being evil recently? It's been my opinion that one of the few things Microsoft does right is keeping it's developers happy. I would think this would be common sense to a company like Apple.

Has anyone spent 500-1000 to buy the WWDC sessions and was it worth it? Is it that different from material like PDC2008 that it's worth 500-1000 bucks?

^ http://developer.apple.com/products/video/wwdc08/index.html

^^ https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx

Charging money != evil

Nevertheless, I agree that asking people to pay for this kind of material is going to get them nowhere. If you want developers to develop for your platform, shutting the door on a large proportion of them is not the way to achieve that.

I spent last weekend watching ton's of PDC2008 Videos on-line, checking out the power points and source code that was made available of the sessions. Then I a email from apple telling me that the WWDC08 video are available for purchase.

As much as I love my Mac, in this regard Microsoft come out tops.

As a contrast, Apple gives you Xcode and all of the tools for free. Microsoft charges how much for a full Visual Studio kit?

I doubt Microsoft makes very much money off Visual Studio -- it is far more strategically important for them to have developers writing code on the various Microsoft platforms. That's been reflected in MS giving away various tools, like Visual Studio Express, the MSVC compiler, etc. I'd think a major reason for why Microsoft still charges for Visual Studio at all is to avoid killing off ISVs who make development tools for Windows programmers.