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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."

11 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. It's good by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whenever a company open sources its code, it's a good thing. Even if no one wants to use it, it still sets a precedent. It wasn't long ago, no one was open-sourcing their code. Now, even Microsoft does some of it.
    This strengthens that trend.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:It's good by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Have to disagree with this. Companies open source code only when they feel that they cannot make money from the code itself. This diminishes the value of the people who created the code in the first place. Developers have generally been among the most highly compensated individual contributors in many companies. The reason for that is because the product they produce was highly valuable (hence why they were paid so much in the first place). The more that companies decide that there is little money to be made by code, the less valuable the people who make the code become. Speaking as a developer, this is not a good trend.

      Your reason for not liking open source is because you want companies to pay you more because of scarcity.

      So, going along that line of thinking, do you also write lousy code in hopes that you are the only one who can maintain it? Because that doesn't work.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:It's good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      This comment seems to come from a professional troller, using the usual arguments:

      * Companies open source code when they are desperate
      * RedHat is the only company that makes money from open source

      An anonymous comment, from generic "I've had much better experiences with getting support for commercial packages than I have with open source", "(assuming that I actually have the time to digest a mountain of someone else's nearly undocumented code in the first place)"

      This sounds like a paid, FUD post.

    3. Re:It's good by macs4all · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Companies don't just open source code when they feel they can't sell it. The entire revenue model for open source is that the software is incidental to something you can sell.

      That's precisely why Apple is so perfect a partner for Open Source, and why they embrace Open Source.

      They didn't have to adjust their business model to include Open Source; they were already there.

      And the reason why Apple is a good thing for Open Source in general is that they actually have the resources to devote to develop, maintain, and improve Open Source Projects that they have an interest in, which, if the Open Source Development Community in general would be honest with themselves, is one of the biggest problems with F/OSS Development overall: Lack of enough dedicated resources to actually do the hard work. A company like Apple simply doesn't have that problem.

      And since their business model doesn't require them to value their software development in a way that requires them to always have an eye towards "profitability", they can be, and are, far more altruistic in their interaction with the F/OSS Development Community, and F/OSS in general, than pretty much any other ostensibly "for profit" hardware/software company on the planet.

  2. Re:Linux Support by mveloso · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Gnustep? It's 2015, not 1993. If you want gnustep support write it yourself.

  3. SWIFT BOAT. SWIFT BOAT. BENGHAZI. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Don't do it. Don't do it. Benghazi.

  4. Re:Open source language by Capsaicin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    I have to disagree - a language which only has one single implementation which is closed source means that the developers using it is locked in and completely at the mercy of the owners of this implementation. Just like with VB6.

    The point that was being made was simply to raise the question: Will an open-sourced Swift have any realistic application other than writing software exclusively for iOS and OSX. If it can't, you should find yourself every bit as locked in and at the mercy of the owners of the ecosystem, as if you were locked in by the owners of a proprietary language.

    --
    Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
  5. Open source isn't enough by DrXym · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A large part of a language's value is the API and framework it works against. It's no good just throwing out a compiler and a barebones set of APIs and thinking it's going to catch on. Unless Swift comes with a set of high level APIs that allow people to build applications / apps on non-Apple platforms then I don't see what the attraction to it will be.

  6. Not an Apple first by HnT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Apple has a much longer history of releasing open source or opening standards than most people like to give them credit for.

    --
    "Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
    1. Re:Not an Apple first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You have patent trolls to thank for that. Facetime was largely peer to peer in the original implementation, so operating costs were low. Apple was forced to change that after the VirtnetX lawsuit and as of August 2013 was being forced to spend $2.4 million per month in costs for relay servers to work around their patent. Obviously Apple isn't going to expend that kind of money to bring Facetime to competing platforms.

      http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/08/30/apples-facetime-workarounds-for-virnetx-patent-suit-causing-complaints-costs-24m-per-month

  7. Re:reasons for doing so by BasilBrush · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Swift's only been out a year, and it's already #14 on the Tiobe index. And has been voted StackOverflow users favourite language. Take up has been anything but slow.

    And I'd expect it to accelerate now, even without the open sourcing, as plenty of people were treating the 1.x label is meaning not yet ready. Plenty of companies will be starting to use it now it's 2.x.