<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jckarter</author><text>Every Mac still ships with Xcode on the OS install disc, as do the OS X upgrade discs. Let&apos;s wait until Lion comes out before assuming that won&apos;t be the case anymore.</text><parent_chain><item><author>A1kmm</author><text>I&apos;m an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn&apos;t work on the Mac (at least last time I looked into it), so we asked Apple for permission to distribute their linker back in 2005, and they said no, so we have been telling Mac users to sign up for a developer account and install XCode (stupid since they had to download multiple gigabytes for a fairly small binary).&lt;p&gt;Even getting XCode for our own use to put on our Mac build server will be difficult now; $4.99 may be a token price, but any price in the academic world means that things have to get charged against a cost centre; policies mean it probably can&apos;t be charged as IT overhead (like Mac build servers and operating systems can) because it is specifically for development, so it needs to be justified as part of a grant. For things like that, the University will probably want Apple to go a months long process to become a designated approver (Apple hardware is not normally purchased direct from Apple), and to pay for things like that by purchase order - the administrative cost of which would be greatly more than $4.99.&lt;p&gt;The end result of all this is that Apple will probably not be a supported platform for our software any more, and users will be asked to use a virtual machine or move to a different platform if they want to use our software.&lt;p&gt;Apple is already one of the most difficult platforms to develop on, largely because of the way their linker and object loaders work; it is one of the few platforms (I think Irix is another) where objects to be opened with a dlopen like mechanism are in a different format to normal shared objects; making the barriers higher for academic users trying to develop multi-platform software will simply result in academic and other free software being less available on Mac; some academic users like being on Mac, but I expect that as it becomes progressively more of a disadvantage and Apple becomes more of a pariah, this will change.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Xcode now costs US$ 4.99</title><url>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id422352214</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>mmastrac</author><text>The GCC toolchain can link Mach-O binaries without using any code from Apple. Building GCC cross-compilers like this is a pain, but crosstools takes a bit of that away:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Basically, you can generate your own binaries and ship them under the GPL. No Apple needed.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ll ask for more info from someone I know who built an OSX cross-compiler under Linux.</text><parent_chain><item><author>A1kmm</author><text>I&apos;m an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn&apos;t work on the Mac (at least last time I looked into it), so we asked Apple for permission to distribute their linker back in 2005, and they said no, so we have been telling Mac users to sign up for a developer account and install XCode (stupid since they had to download multiple gigabytes for a fairly small binary).&lt;p&gt;Even getting XCode for our own use to put on our Mac build server will be difficult now; $4.99 may be a token price, but any price in the academic world means that things have to get charged against a cost centre; policies mean it probably can&apos;t be charged as IT overhead (like Mac build servers and operating systems can) because it is specifically for development, so it needs to be justified as part of a grant. For things like that, the University will probably want Apple to go a months long process to become a designated approver (Apple hardware is not normally purchased direct from Apple), and to pay for things like that by purchase order - the administrative cost of which would be greatly more than $4.99.&lt;p&gt;The end result of all this is that Apple will probably not be a supported platform for our software any more, and users will be asked to use a virtual machine or move to a different platform if they want to use our software.&lt;p&gt;Apple is already one of the most difficult platforms to develop on, largely because of the way their linker and object loaders work; it is one of the few platforms (I think Irix is another) where objects to be opened with a dlopen like mechanism are in a different format to normal shared objects; making the barriers higher for academic users trying to develop multi-platform software will simply result in academic and other free software being less available on Mac; some academic users like being on Mac, but I expect that as it becomes progressively more of a disadvantage and Apple becomes more of a pariah, this will change.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Xcode now costs US$ 4.99</title><url>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id422352214</url></story>