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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. 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 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.

  2. 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".