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I am fan of the philosophy free for personal use and money for professional use. Because, when I make money of somebody else work, I should give some of that so
by PinguTS 4y ago
I am fan of the philosophy free for personal use and money for professional use. Because, when I make money of somebody else work, I should give some of that somebody else (what ever 'some' means).
That said, there is a lot to consider for companies like Apple in this world. Yes, it is not only Apple that does this. Apple is just apparent as with the iPhone it became so ubiquitous.
Apple wants to be known for a clean platform for consumers without worrying about viruses and such things. Ever heard about a ransomware on your shiny iPhone? If you want to maintain this, then you need a strict enforcement of who can run what on the platform. These days such enforcement is done via certificates. At first Apple was somehow lax on that enforcement. That allowed side-loading of apps on your iPhone. For development purposes good. Of course for personal use great. But the first actors appeared and used that to distribute their apps. I remember when Google Ingress where a thing way befor Pokemon Go. Ingress was Android only. No iPhone. Because it was from Google. Then some people came along and build an iOS app, which you could download from Github. Then when some shady actors got banned from the Appstore they distributed their apps via shady websites. I assume at one point the decision grew that they need to do something to prevent this.
Another thing is, the development tools are not free as in free beer. Maintaining development tools costs resources. That's why I need to buy the development tools. If I do embedded I may need to buy a Keil compiler. If I do FPGA I may need to buy Altera or Xilinx. But the Apple tool chain is free of charge. Maintenance costs resources. That's why in the past you needed to buy the Development account to have access to the tool chain at all. Now, these days, the tool chain is free-of-charge. So you could ask "Hey, they are such a money maker, why can't they just cross finance that?" That is valid. On the other, why? Why shouldn't that business unit finance itself?
So there are many different things to consider.
- smoldesu 4y ago> But the Apple tool chain is free of charge. Good? It's built on free software like LLVM and Clang, if Apple charged for that it would be like pricing CUPS as an additional MacOS feature. If Apple cares about security, they should build it into their OS, not their services. You can paint this however you want, but regulators have already seen the marketing side of it. Now they want to bring the world's largest company to heel.
- aksss 4y ago> the [Apple] tool chain is free of charge I don’t see it that way for iPhones specifically. If I want to build an iPhone app, I’m technically required to have Mac hardware and MacOS, so that’s a pretty hefty cost barrier if I otherwise have no need for that platform. Yes, there are virtualized, rentable, and legally dubious workarounds to this, but on paper the requirement is still there. And it’s entirely a case of vendor lock in, right?