With the release of Xcode 4 came a completely unknown feature, even for developers like myself: a price tag. This is the first time that Xcode has ever had a price. Since the release of OS X, Xcode (and its predecessor Project Builder) have been available free of charge.
At the time, having a full, professional grade IDE available for free was mostly unheard of. Compared with Visual Studio, who’s minimum entrance fee was in the range of $1000. Students, of course, got a discount. Since then having a free IDE on your platform has become the norm. If this is because of Xcode or not, I am not sure.
Suddenly, for the first time, Xcode has a price for non-paid developers: $4.99. There has been an uproar as to what open source developers and people who are interested in learning to program will do. That Apple is somehow taking away a lot from developers by adding this barrier to entry. I would argue, they aren’t.
Open source developers often list Xcode as a dependency for those that wanted to compile from source, not because the project required Xcode, but because it installed the requisite compilers. If having Xcode as a dependency is not something that developers want, then the community is going to need to pick up the slack as per keeping the toolchain current and packaged. As these tools are open source, it shouldn’t be that difficult to do (although we do know what happens when we say shouldn’t….)
Ignoring the argument that if you can afford a Mac, and you’re interested in learning to program, you can afford $5 dollars for tools to develop with. More than likely, the book you pick up to learn Objective-C will cost a heck of a lot more than that.
At the end of the day, any serious mac developer is going to have the $99 dollar subscription to the Mac developer program. If you’re looking to learn to program for the Mac, 5 dollars is a minimal investment for access to a world class development tools. If you’re just looking to program on your Mac but don’t want to spend the $5 for Xcode or $99 for the developer subscription, learn a language different than Objective-C. There are many build in programming languages in OSX, including Python and Ruby.
As for me? I will keep my paid developer accounts ignore the rest of the uproar.
Actually, in order to install the latest version of Ruby, as well as many gems, not to mention tools like git, you need to be able to run make and gcc, and those are only currently available via XCode. (And if you think that porting a compiler to a new platform “shouldn’t be that difficult to do” then I would love to hire you!
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I hear your point about $5 being a pretty tame price point, but I’m a volunteer at the Railsbridge Open Workshops, and many of our students are unemployed, some using borrowed laptops to try to learn a bit of programming and maybe change careers. And even if they could afford five bucks, they may not even have a valid credit card… This hasn’t been a real problem yet, knock wood, but it’s not as simple as it seems.
Alex,
Thanks for the comment. I may not have been as clear as I should have – the original draft of this was interrupted by the Tohoku earthquake this past March.
No doubt porting a new compiler to a new platform is a difficult task. My point is that if the compilers are all open source ( which they are ) it only takes one developer to purchase the developer tools and create packages that anybody can install.
I can’t speak for ruby gems offering pre-compiled versions, but many tools e.g. git do have packages available so you don’t need to compile it yourself.
If you happen to run into the problem where they have the 5 bucks and want Xcode but no valid credit card, you can gift apps; or, even better, get an iTunes gift card, which I’m 99% sure can be used on the Mac App store as well.
If you want make and gcc, just install xcode 3.x… it’s still free!