It doesn't involve credit cards as xcode 3 is still freely available. If Apple does not include the developer tools on the Lion DVD, and if they remove all free versions of xcode for download, then I don't doubt someone will package up the "build essentials" for OSX and make them available. To date there has been no reason to do this, but if there is a reason, there is nothing preventing it that I am aware of.
edit: though I agree a smaller "build essentials" tool chain would be nice, but that was the case before you had to pay for xcode and nobody has bothered to create one. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be possible, only that it's probably not worth the hassle of setting it up and maintaining it (though Apple doing it would be excellent).
Xcode 3 doesn't solve the issue of it being a real pain in the butt to install. gcc by itself is much, much smaller and much less of an issue for a casual user to install.
Anyone who hits the need for gcc is no longer a casual user by any average use of that term. A casual user rarely moves past opening a .dmg or .zip with an installer pkg.
A casual developer might be a different class of user ... but anyone who hits the point of writing code & installing libraries instead of applications has adequately stepped outside the role of user.
And even granting that, it is still not a firm enough basis on which to argue such an inflammatory statement as "OS X is not for developers"--when the casual developer is far better served by OS X's included toolchain than s/he is going to find in a default installation of Windows/Linux counterparts.
OS X is not "for" developers when it begins removing the tools that create the lowest barrier to entry for casual development I've seen in a default OS installation in the last 10 years (except maybe Gentoo Linux, one of the most "for developers" systems I've had the pleasure of using).
I define it as a casual user of my libraries. Designers are the best example: they're usually hooked into the development world and would be interested in a clever command line tool, but they normally don't have an entire build chain under their belt.
I'm a designer, and a "user" of software, and I use several terminal commands on a regular basis. I don't consider myself anything approaching a "developer," but I code a little in Ruby, Javascript, etc. It's semantics, sure, but when you draw hard lines around what people are and what they "need," you potentially limit a lot of blurrier, less-stereotypical scenarios. And how is a designer (or a child, or a business-person, or a manager, or whoever) supposed to cross that mystical threshold into beginner developer if the tools are behind a financial or obfuscatory barrier?
I think that's the main argument. Getting started with command-line tools and developer-type stuff should be as easy as possible, so that people can try new things and break stereotypes and do more than they thought they could do.
I agree that a smaller (and free) tool chain would be great, but so far as I know there is nothing preventing anyone from making one.
Related, I realize it is now the case, but when did casual users start needing gcc? Time was, in my pre-OSX days, compiling things yourself if you weren't a dev was seen as somewhat pointless, you just get thousands of users all building the same binary instead of building one binary to be downloaded by thousands of users...
That totally outside the scope of this issue, though. If you feel that having to install Xcode to get a gcc install on a Mac, that's fine, but that's the way it's been for a while now. Apple charging for Xcode 4 didn't change that.
There's a scale of developers: from people who regularly do this sort of thing, to people who are more casual about it. That's the type of audience that I like to write for sometimes: they'll use my library (which may use compiled code), but they haven't been exposed to this area of software development before. Designers are the best stereotype for this. Having a massive Xcode install is what I'm saying is detrimental to these sorts of casual users (a lot of the time it wouldn't be appropriate to call them "progammers", really).
It's friction, but, really. It came with their computer. You click a bunch of buttons and it's installed. The size of the install is irrelevant.
But I still have difficulty believing these casual-developers-but-not-programmers exist in great numbers. Have people told you "I was going to try your thing, but it asked for this weird gcc thing"?
Absolutely. I run into that frequently with my own projects. It's such a bummer to have to tell someone to go through this whole process for such a small `gem install` command.
edit: though I agree a smaller "build essentials" tool chain would be nice, but that was the case before you had to pay for xcode and nobody has bothered to create one. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be possible, only that it's probably not worth the hassle of setting it up and maintaining it (though Apple doing it would be excellent).