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Reactions To Apple's Plans To Open Source Swift

Posted by Soulskill on from the open-source-clapping dept.

itwbennett writes: At Apple's WWDC 2015 event yesterday, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, announced that the company planned to open source the Swift language. Reaction to this announcement so far has sounded more or less like this: Deafening applause with undertones of "we'll see." As a commenter on this Ars Technica story points out, "Their [Apple's] previous open-source efforts (Darwin, WebKit, etc) have generally tended to be far more towards the Google style of closed development followed by a public source dump." Simon Phipps, the former director of OSI, also expressed some reservations, saying, "While every additional piece of open source software extends the opportunities for software freedom, the critical question for a programming language is less whether it is itself open source and more whether it's feasible to make open source software with it. Programming languages are glue for SDKs, APIs and libraries. The real value of Swift will be whether it can realistically be used anywhere but Apple's walled garden."

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's good by gtall · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    "This is a lie." No, it isn't a lie. It is the posters opinion. Stop imputing motives from your imagination.

  2. Rust, Swift: Systematically Better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Rust and Swift are like honest, serious business people who sometimes make mistakes which they regret.

    C is like the Italian mafia: Rotten at the core.

    "Incidentally, its not the C language itself that gets exploited usually, it is the stuff people write in it."

    Likewise, it is not cocaine which is dangerous. It is the weak humans who have - due to their incredible laziness - not yet developed the antibodies for cocaine. See how cocaine is a harmless substance ?

    Seriously, there is not a single human on this globe who never makes one of these low-level mistakes like a off-by-one array access, a double-free() or the like. We had highly experienced system programmers from HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle messing up badly with the C language. C is evil because it does not provide a safety net which can easily been provided. Rust, Swift and Sappeur prove that.

    Now, maybe you can understand this argument ?

  3. Licensing terms are critical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Released as "open source" the way Sun and Oracle released Java, with restrictive terms preventing outside projects from forking or even reimplementing code, would not be much of a blessing, except for developers already committed to writing Swift code.

    Ditto if it's released as "open source" the way Microsoft released .NET, with key pieces kept proprietary. Not very useful except for existing .NET developers.