[dmitriid]

You keep piling more and more unrelated things onto a very simple concept. "Free as in beer" literally talks just about the cost of distributed software. That's it.

Your attempt to somehow conflate it with someone's business models are laughable at best. All software comes with strings attached. And the biggest one is: even people who distribute software for free still have a business to run and mouths to feed.

[simondotau]

I see where you're confused. You might well have a valid point if the discussion was about the Xcode IDE or whatever developer tools are supplied alongside Unreal Engine. That's not what the discussion was relating to. Per the great great great great great great great grandparent's post, the discussion was referring to "...the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905694

Or indeed that post's parent, where a different opinion was offered about when a license for CoreML libraries was paid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905596

Or its parent, the one which initially defined the scope of the discussion, which was "...Apple charging a license for the frameworks and tooling they provide..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905555

Not about the Xcode IDE itself which I agree is free-as-in-beer. (Though others might disagree — an argument could be made that it was paid for the purchase of a relevant Apple hardware product; the fact that it wasn't pre-installed being a mere technicality.)