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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."

19 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: 5, Informative

      "With respect to a business model, the only open source company that has been highly profitable is RedHat. It is important to note that RedHat made their money not by *creating* the open source code, but rather by providing support services for those who wanted to use someone else's open source code. Linus Torvald may be making good money from Linux (I've read conflicting reports). But other than that there really are not many examples of companies recognizing significant revenue by giving away code."

      What are you talking about? RedHat made just about everything that encompasses modern Linux, from GTK+ and Gnome (say what you will about recent releases) to systemd and the Kernel itself. After more than a decade of dominating, it was only in February of this year that another company, Intel, made a larger percentage of kernel contributions (historically, RedHat has written about 16% of the modern Linux kernel). And what distribution does Linus work from? You might follow the fedora development mailing lists to see his contributions directly.

      Linux is RedHat's baby, and it isn't just because of the support contracts.

    3. Re:It's good by Ramze · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "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.

    4. 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:Odd that they highlight those projects by CraigCruden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  3. Linux Support by nateman1352 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Linux Support by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  4. i was just thinking... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Funny, I was just the other day thinking, "what the world really needs right now, is another programming language".

    The tiny number of choices in programming languages is the main thing holding back the industry, so it is great to finally see a new one. It's far too common that I think, "I've got this great idea for a new program... if only I had a viable language to program it in".

    1. Re:i was just thinking... by nine-times · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  5. Wrong comparision by igomaniac · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... It's a lot more appropriate to compare the open sourcing of Swift to the LLVM/Clang projects than to Darwin. LLVM is by any measure a thriving open source project with lots of contributers, both individuals and from many large organisations (Intel/AMD/ARM/Google/Microsoft, etc. etc.). I also follow Webkit development to some degree and it's far from "the Google style of closed development followed by a public source dump", a fact that should be clear to anyone who takes a minute to look at the webkit-dev mailing list.

    --

    The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
  6. 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
  7. Stop Whining by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. 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.

  9. iOS Dev on Windows by gnupun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  10. 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 macs4all · · Score: 3, Informative

      "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." - Steve Jobs, WWDC 2010

      But it never happened.

      And, as has been explained many times in these pages, that was SJ talking out his ass, without clearing it with his legal team. Turns out that Facetime was using some decidedly NON Open Source CODECS (and maybe other stuff), and so there was NO WAY that Apple could "Open" Facetime in any meaningful way.

      In fact, Apple was fined $368 million regarding Facetime, for violating 4 patents by patent troll VirnetX. So, even if Apple had tried to make Facetime an Industry Standard (which I fully believe was SJ's intent), VirnetX would simply have been waiting in the wings to sue anyone who tried to implement said standard.

      I am not apologizing for Apple; them's the facts. So, can we finally stop this meme? Of course not; this is Slashdot, afterall.

  11. FaceTime by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." - Steve Jobs, WWDC 2010

    But Apple never followed-up on that.

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
  12. 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.