Is there a developer licensing program for OSX?

Question

Microsoft offers a bunch of incentives for developers (like MSDN) and startups (like BizSpark) to get them to develop software for the Microsoft platform with less investment. MSDN for example allows me to test my software on every version of Windows in existence without buying a full license to that version. BizSpark is even better, giving all the software essentially for free, as long as it's used for the startup's business purposes.

Does Apple offer something similar?

P.S. So far the only legal way of testing our software on OSX that I found is to buy a Mac Mini, which costs almost as much as MSDN and doesn't come with a tenth of the benefits (as far as software development is concerned).

Answer 1

The closest thing I know of is the Mac Developer Program which gives you access to various resources but specific to your question you gives you access to software currently in development for compatibility testing etc as well as other compatibility testing tools. You still need a mac to make use of many of the benefits but if you are a member you do get a hardware discount. I'm not aware of any service that is as extensive as MSDN and as the features mentioned are only available to ADC Select or ADC Premier accounts. I can't give you exact details of everything an overview can be found at http://developer.apple.com/products/mac/program/

You can access many resources with a free ADC account though non of the features anywhere near what you are talking about are in the free account.

Edit: I forgot to add that there is a "compatibility labs" feature that allows you to test your software against different setups and os version etc. It says on the site: "The Compatibility Labs feature a wide range of Macintosh configurations, allowing you to test on a multitude of Apple technologies with various versions of Mac OS X software, including Intel-based or PowerPC Macs, Xserve, iPhone, iPod and much more."

Answer 2

OS X ships with all of the dev tools on the install disk. An ADC select membership ($500) is cheaper than Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription, as far as I can tell.

I don't know of any BizSpark-like program on the Apple side.

Answer 3

With Microsoft, you can get their "Visual Studio Pro With MSDN Pro" subscription, which is currently about $800 a year. That provides operating system installs (which you have to unlock online, ten at a time), technical documentation, and the Visual Studio development system. I think you might get a few developer tech support incidents with that.

With Apple, you can join the ADC Online program for free; that gives you complete technical documentation and the XCode development system. Then you can buy Snow Leopard for $29 and do unlimited installs because there's no key - or if you buy a new Mac, you get it for free. You can don't get any developer tech support incidents, but you can join a boatload of free Apple-sponsored email lists, online developer forums, and so on which their internal engineers are pretty active.

In both cases, you still need hardware. For Mac development, that's $600 for a Mac Mini which includes the development system and unlimited OS installs. For Windows development, that's $800 for the OS installs and development system, plus whatever else you spend on hardware.

I pay the $800 a year for the MSDN/Visual Studio subscription. I also pay $499 a year for an Apple Select membership, which provides extra goodies like a discount on Apple hardware, beta versions of the OS, and developer tech support incidents.

MSDN was a pretty good deal a number of years ago, when they bundled Office with it. Now that it's mostly Visual Studio plus Windows installs, not so good. These days, I think Apple's offerings provide much more value for the money - especially the free ones - but YMMV.