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Make no mistake, Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consume

Make no mistake, Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.

jseliger 15y ago
Developers are also disproportionately useful for a platform, since they're the ones who build the stuff people want to use; for more on that, see http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html , as well as the bazillion other writers pointing out similar things.
- vog 15y ago
  Although there is some truth in it, I think that Apple is following a different strategy. They don't really attract developers by a developer-friendly environment, but by the number of worthy users of their platform. Regarding the embedded devices (i.e. iOS, App Store, etc.) you could even call this a developer-hostile environment. Yet there are lots of developers taking this hassle just to get access to Apple's user base.
X-Istence 15y ago
That isn't necessarily true. Xcode is a very awesome IDE, it has had its growing pains but with the new clang based backend it can go far and fast. Not being reliant on older and more stagnant and more tightly coupled GCC to get there. It is in Apple's best interest to have a compiler that is also used to do the checking of code in real time within the IDE be the same. It makes more sense because otherwise you get differing results in the IDE versus compile time. It is within Apple's best interest to help developers develop and make it easy to find issues, clang's output for errors are absolutely fantastic. If you type something wrong it provides suggestions for what you may have meant (and most of the time they are accurate). I think Xcode is one location where Apple is showing that it does care about developers by building a better product with better integrated tools (git for example ...). Are there things we miss from the old Xcode, sure, but overall it is clear that Apple understand they need to provide developers with tools that help them get their job done. --- Clang though is helping the ENTIRE development community. It is an BSD licensed compiler with some absolutely awesome features. 1. Their human readable error messages. I've spent a lot less time Googling random compiler failures or trying to parse GCC's or MSVC's output so that I can understand it and fix the error (especially in heavily templated C++ code) just by having the compiler give me human readable errors. This goes a long way for a developer that misplaced a semicolon or is attempting to use a const variable into some Boost code that expects a non-const variable thereby causing thousands of lines of template errors to be thrown. 2. The LLVM allows for very interesting "languages" to be easily prototyped and tested, and JIT compilation and a few other things can be created. 3. clang can read incomplete code files and make code completion suggestions. Not just tied to Xcode, but as a library. clang_complete for Vim is absolutely fantastic and by far my favourite Vim script. --- Why exactly should Apple be required to ship GPL versions of the software when they could ship BSD licensed utilities without having to worry about being GPL compliant. Just because a few people prefer the GPL version they can't remove it from their system? They believe the GPL licensed tools to be inferior (and with the GPLv3 causes more legal headaches than it is worth) and thus they are replacing them with a set of tools that fit their requirements. Why does that mean that they "could give a rat's ass about the developer community"? Why exactly would they continue to develop clang/llvm as an open source project?
- wmf 15y ago
  Clang is one side, but the other side is things like bash. Apple isn't developing a superior, BSD-licensed shell; they're just planning to ship the same old version of bash until the end of time. Some parts of OS X are getting better but other parts are stagnating.
  - X-Istence 15y ago
    What crystal ball are you looking at that says they are going to continue shipping bash? zsh is a viable replacement that is MIT licensed ... There are plenty of other shells out there as well that they could replace bash with. Bash isn't the end all be-all of shells.
    - diminish 15y ago
      The good side is that with zsh and some other software getting their place in OS/X; Linux and OSX communities will diverge away from each other. I kind of like this as a Linux user and developer. With OS/X or Apple we share so little in principles (read a lot of comments here), vision and development(now) and it is good if we end up being 2 mutually exclusive ecosystem similar to Windows/Linux. Being a former Apple employee and having enjoyed Apple's ditching of the classic Mac OSes for OS/X, both worlds have had pretty much similar environments. After 2012 the Apple and Linux development communities appear to be totally accelerating in different directions.
      - rsanders 15y ago
        OS X and Linux never shared a common parent or converged. The BSD heritage is what makes it Unixy. BSD has been oil to Linux's water for a long time.
        diminish 15y ago
        For Linux and OS/X, noone said they share common parent; the shared common tools such as bash, samba and a lot of stuff removed as mentioned by this article will create diverging ecosystems (and before replying watch out, noone says diverging kernels).
rimantas 15y ago
How many billions have Apple already paid out to iOS and Mac App Store developers? How many attendees did they have at WWDC? Getting rid of GPL in now way means getting rid of developers.
feralchimp 15y ago
> Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding. This is a popular refrain, but I don't think it holds up well at all under scrutiny: 1. By your logic, who should care about developers? Only open source projects or ISVs? And yet everyone does, a lot. 2. iOS platform developers buy Macs (and often multiple iOS devices) to develop iOS apps. 3. Xcode, warts and all, is basically free. Same with all of the OS X and iOS developer documentation. Have you priced Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription lately? 4. No one who feels this way has had Quinn the Eskimo answer a Core OS or Networking question for them in the Apple Dev Forums. If you don't care about developers, you don't pay folks like him to dispense wisdom to a bunch of yahoos who each paid $99/year.
- knieveltech 15y ago
  1. Pretty much just open source projects or ISVs, and I think you'll find "everyone" gets a lot smaller the further you get from the Valley. 2. No disrespect intended but BFD? Are you proposing that developer hardware purchases represent anything besides a rounding error in Apple's hardware sales? 3. I see Xcode's pay-to-upgrade model and $99/yr developer subscriptions as a variation on the MSDN/Visual Studios theme. 4. Wait, what? Cult of Personality issues aside, we're talking about a company that's pulling in billions in profits quarterly nickle-and-diming their developer community. How is this beneficial to developers again?
  - feralchimp 15y ago
    1. I think you underestimate the amount of dev talent being consumed outside of "software companies", for a wide variety of platforms (including desktops). 2. Fair point, but are you proposing Apple doesn't care whether devs buy Android and WinMo devices instead? None of these platforms are fighting for developer attention in a vacuum, but they are fighting for developer attention. 3. Xcode charging $5 to upgrade is quite a "variation" on that theme indeed. $99/year dev subscriptions, again, are outside MSDN theme-level fees by an order of magnitude. 4. My point is that if you're paying $0.30 per day to rent a Ferrari, Ferrari is not "nickel-and-diming" you. Is "totally free" the only fee level at which you're interested in consuming tools and developer support? Do you make such decisions for an organization with money riding on the results?
DarkShikari 15y ago
Developers make the software that goes on their platform. Microsoft didn't gain their huge market share in the 90s through magical spells; they won by being extremely developer-friendly. Without a "developer community", Apple wouldn't exist as a company.

jseliger 15y ago

Developers are also disproportionately useful for a platform, since they're the ones who build the stuff people want to use; for more on that, see http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html , as well as the bazillion other writers pointing out similar things.

vog 15y ago
Although there is some truth in it, I think that Apple is following a different strategy. They don't really attract developers by a developer-friendly environment, but by the number of worthy users of their platform. Regarding the embedded devices (i.e. iOS, App Store, etc.) you could even call this a developer-hostile environment. Yet there are lots of developers taking this hassle just to get access to Apple's user base.

X-Istence 15y ago

That isn't necessarily true. Xcode is a very awesome IDE, it has had its growing pains but with the new clang based backend it can go far and fast. Not being reliant on older and more stagnant and more tightly coupled GCC to get there. It is in Apple's best interest to have a compiler that is also used to do the checking of code in real time within the IDE be the same. It makes more sense because otherwise you get differing results in the IDE versus compile time. It is within Apple's best interest to help developers develop and make it easy to find issues, clang's output for errors are absolutely fantastic. If you type something wrong it provides suggestions for what you may have meant (and most of the time they are accurate). I think Xcode is one location where Apple is showing that it does care about developers by building a better product with better integrated tools (git for example ...). Are there things we miss from the old Xcode, sure, but overall it is clear that Apple understand they need to provide developers with tools that help them get their job done. --- Clang though is helping the ENTIRE development community. It is an BSD licensed compiler with some absolutely awesome features. 1. Their human readable error messages. I've spent a lot less time Googling random compiler failures or trying to parse GCC's or MSVC's output so that I can understand it and fix the error (especially in heavily templated C++ code) just by having the compiler give me human readable errors. This goes a long way for a developer that misplaced a semicolon or is attempting to use a const variable into some Boost code that expects a non-const variable thereby causing thousands of lines of template errors to be thrown. 2. The LLVM allows for very interesting "languages" to be easily prototyped and tested, and JIT compilation and a few other things can be created. 3. clang can read incomplete code files and make code completion suggestions. Not just tied to Xcode, but as a library. clang_complete for Vim is absolutely fantastic and by far my favourite Vim script. --- Why exactly should Apple be required to ship GPL versions of the software when they could ship BSD licensed utilities without having to worry about being GPL compliant. Just because a few people prefer the GPL version they can't remove it from their system? They believe the GPL licensed tools to be inferior (and with the GPLv3 causes more legal headaches than it is worth) and thus they are replacing them with a set of tools that fit their requirements. Why does that mean that they "could give a rat's ass about the developer community"? Why exactly would they continue to develop clang/llvm as an open source project?

wmf 15y ago
Clang is one side, but the other side is things like bash. Apple isn't developing a superior, BSD-licensed shell; they're just planning to ship the same old version of bash until the end of time. Some parts of OS X are getting better but other parts are stagnating.
- X-Istence 15y ago
  What crystal ball are you looking at that says they are going to continue shipping bash? zsh is a viable replacement that is MIT licensed ... There are plenty of other shells out there as well that they could replace bash with. Bash isn't the end all be-all of shells.
  - diminish 15y ago
    The good side is that with zsh and some other software getting their place in OS/X; Linux and OSX communities will diverge away from each other. I kind of like this as a Linux user and developer. With OS/X or Apple we share so little in principles (read a lot of comments here), vision and development(now) and it is good if we end up being 2 mutually exclusive ecosystem similar to Windows/Linux. Being a former Apple employee and having enjoyed Apple's ditching of the classic Mac OSes for OS/X, both worlds have had pretty much similar environments. After 2012 the Apple and Linux development communities appear to be totally accelerating in different directions.
    - rsanders 15y ago
      OS X and Linux never shared a common parent or converged. The BSD heritage is what makes it Unixy. BSD has been oil to Linux's water for a long time.
      - diminish 15y ago
        For Linux and OS/X, noone said they share common parent; the shared common tools such as bash, samba and a lot of stuff removed as mentioned by this article will create diverging ecosystems (and before replying watch out, noone says diverging kernels).

rimantas 15y ago

How many billions have Apple already paid out to iOS and Mac App Store developers? How many attendees did they have at WWDC? Getting rid of GPL in now way means getting rid of developers.

feralchimp 15y ago

> Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding. This is a popular refrain, but I don't think it holds up well at all under scrutiny: 1. By your logic, who should care about developers? Only open source projects or ISVs? And yet everyone does, a lot. 2. iOS platform developers buy Macs (and often multiple iOS devices) to develop iOS apps. 3. Xcode, warts and all, is basically free. Same with all of the OS X and iOS developer documentation. Have you priced Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription lately? 4. No one who feels this way has had Quinn the Eskimo answer a Core OS or Networking question for them in the Apple Dev Forums. If you don't care about developers, you don't pay folks like him to dispense wisdom to a bunch of yahoos who each paid $99/year.

knieveltech 15y ago
1. Pretty much just open source projects or ISVs, and I think you'll find "everyone" gets a lot smaller the further you get from the Valley. 2. No disrespect intended but BFD? Are you proposing that developer hardware purchases represent anything besides a rounding error in Apple's hardware sales? 3. I see Xcode's pay-to-upgrade model and $99/yr developer subscriptions as a variation on the MSDN/Visual Studios theme. 4. Wait, what? Cult of Personality issues aside, we're talking about a company that's pulling in billions in profits quarterly nickle-and-diming their developer community. How is this beneficial to developers again?
- feralchimp 15y ago
  1. I think you underestimate the amount of dev talent being consumed outside of "software companies", for a wide variety of platforms (including desktops). 2. Fair point, but are you proposing Apple doesn't care whether devs buy Android and WinMo devices instead? None of these platforms are fighting for developer attention in a vacuum, but they are fighting for developer attention. 3. Xcode charging $5 to upgrade is quite a "variation" on that theme indeed. $99/year dev subscriptions, again, are outside MSDN theme-level fees by an order of magnitude. 4. My point is that if you're paying $0.30 per day to rent a Ferrari, Ferrari is not "nickel-and-diming" you. Is "totally free" the only fee level at which you're interested in consuming tools and developer support? Do you make such decisions for an organization with money riding on the results?

DarkShikari 15y ago

Developers make the software that goes on their platform. Microsoft didn't gain their huge market share in the 90s through magical spells; they won by being extremely developer-friendly. Without a "developer community", Apple wouldn't exist as a company.