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Reactions To Apple's Plans To Open Source Swift
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."
Chris Lattner started the LLVM project (basis for clang) before joining Apple. He was asking them a lot of questions in relation to his attempts to implement objective-c on it. Obviously Apple thought what he was doing was a great idea and hired him. I have no doubt that this was always in the plans since when quizzed about whether Swift would be open sourced they would not commit but always sounded open to the idea (i.e. they would not announce it until they were actually ready).
"Companies open source code only when they feel that they cannot make money from the code itself."
This is a lie. There are lots of reasons code is open sourced.
Sometimes it's to help standardize communications
ex: BSD licensed TCP/IP stack which was borrowed and adapted for many OSes including windows
ex: webkit released by Apple which was later used by Chrome et al.
This time, it's likely to encourage developers to learn Swift which although may be used to write code for other platforms will most likely encourage more devs to write code specifically for Apple while also helping Apple improve Swift as it evolves. This means more software will likely be written for Apple than would not be if they didn't open source it. It's a win for them financially in the long run.
As for the open source business model, who gives a crap? Who said that open source had to be a business model? Apple is primarily a hardware company. They sell devices at a premium and generally provide the software free or dirt cheap. Much of the base of their systems is open source. OS X is based on Darwin. It uses the CUPS printer system, too. Apple has open sourced a LOT of its internal software and used a lot of open source code as the basis for its products. They even brag about it:
https://www.apple.com/opensour...
Do you think Apple software developers aren't paid for their work? How are they devalued or diminished as Apple open sources their work? I'm fairly certain they're still on the payroll even decades after their work was released to open source. Darwin went open source 15 years ago. Apple made money by giving away source code (like webkit - it helped standardize the web beyond IE and mozilla to make Safari a stronger IE replacement and OS X a stronger alternative to Windows.)
I feel like I should call the Waaambulance because you feel like you deserve higher pay because a company chose not to exploit your work for the maximum dollar value and pass some of that along to you.
As for the quality of code in closed vs open source and the responsiveness of the dev teams -- that varies from project to project and company to company anyway. It varies too wildly to even make a generalization. I've seen some crap code from major vendors and I've seen support discontinued unceremoniously as well.
Apple has always been very careful to keep important elements (e.g. the GUI of OSX) proprietary code. That is were they perceive their competitive edge and how they can assure an excellent revenue flow and enormous profits.
So, ease up.
Does open source Swift mean we finally don't have to buy a mac machine just to run XCode to develop iOS apps? Does Apple have plans to release an open source iOS simulator, so we can simulate iOS apps on Windows/Linux etc?
Funny, because I was just thinking, what the computing industry really needs is stagnation. I'm tired of all this innovation and people trying to create new things. It would be so nice if we'd just stuck with the technologies that we had in the 70s, but no, people had to ruin it by coming up with new things. We should know by now that no one can improve on the wonderful language that is Javascript.
I seem to remember that during the presentation they explicitly stated that would be releasing a Linux version of the runtime libraries for Swift. At least that should give you the basics for a console/text user interface.
I doubt Apple is going to be making any GUI binding other than for Cocoa. I also doubt that the bindings for Cocoa will be included in the open source packages. It will be interesting to see how accepting they will be of community contributions.
I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings. The ability to port iOS/OS X software to Linux and the ability to port Linux GUI programs to OS X without running an X11 server is far too interesting a capability to pass up. If there were GUI bindings for Linux as well as OS X you could simply recode your old GUI in Swift but leave the business logic in tact. Since Swift can link to C and C++ libraries (C++ with a Obj C wrapper) this should not be a big problem.