"Free as in beer" only concerns itself with the price of the distributed software.
Edit:
In Epic's case the tools remain free as in beer. There's no additional cost to using them.
Epic applies a fee to what you produce with them, and even then:
> A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt.
If you were to distribute your product for free (as you want), you wouldn't pay Epic a single cent.
Yes, I know what Epic's business model is. As with many software libraries, it's free as in “first sign this contract, do some stuff with our stuff, then later we shall decide how much you owe us”.
If you want to lump that in with free as in beer because Epic isn't taking money from people who haven't made something particularly profitable, okay, but I don’t think many people would agree with you.
(It's also free-as-in-you're-part-of-their-marketing-strategy. Widespread "free" use of Unreal Engine helps build developer experience with Unreal Engine, increasing the availability of relevant skills in the job market, and making its use more attractive when it comes time to start a big, highly profitable project.)
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.
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 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.)
Right, and my point is that it's not free as in beer.