Reactions To Apple's Plans To Open Source Swift 246
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."
It's good (Score:5, Insightful)
This strengthens that trend.
Re:It's good (Score:5, 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.
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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.
Huh? I thought that was the standard business model of small b2b software companies.
Re:It's good (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.
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"With respect to a business model, the only open source company that has been highly profitable is RedHat. "
Ummm... Google.
Actually a lot of companies are making money with open source. Apple with Webkit and Darwin, Google with Android and Chome Books, IBM with Linux, Intel with Linux, Cray with Linux, and so on.
You do not make a lot of money selling Linux or other Open Source products. You make money using Open Source products. And when using them you add more value to them by making them better.
I do not b
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Except that they us Linux for the internal systems...
You are making a distinction without a difference.
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... Well there isn't much I your post that's correct.
Red hat certainly didn't "make" the things you mentioned, they contributed to them, and in most causes were not the biggest contributor.
Second, you don't know shit about how red hat the business makes money. The majority of their income comes from investments they made based on income during their IPO.
Red Hat isn't a Linux company any more. It's an investment organization that also sells some Linux support.
Being publicly traded company this is all publi
Re: It's good (Score:2)
You don't seem to realize that you simultaneously responded to the parent and grandparent posts. The first paragraph is in quotation marks.
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I don't think you understand the phrase "With respect to a business model".
Sony, IBM, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Google and many others
please point me to the source code of their *core product*.
Google search algorithms? Closed source.
Sony firmwares? Closed source.
IBM DB2, AIX, Lotus? Closed source.
eBay.com? Closed source.
Amazon.com? Closed source.
The only people who swallow your bullshit are too lazy to check their facts.
So she says.
Re:It's good (Score:5, 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... [apple.com]
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.
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Actually Webkit was forked from KHTML, which is LGPL so Apple were forced to open source it.
That's why most companies open source their software. They either have no choice because they want to use GPL code, or they want to use BSD style licensed code but don't want to look like dicks or be the only ones maintaining it.
Other reasons include trust (especially with crypto), and as you mention wanting to promote standards for high quality free implementations.
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Actually Webkit was forked from KHTML, which is LGPL so Apple were forced to open source it.
That's why most companies open source their software. They either have no choice because they want to use GPL code,
Hooray for the GPL. Corporations buy legislation, that's use of force. We have to use force against them.
Stop Whining (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.
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Perhaps when it comes to application or game software companies will only open source once it's reached the end of its commercial value, but it's very different when it comes to something like a programming language which hopes to create an ecosystem and encourage use by a highly technical audience.
The average end user of a word processor typically wouldn't know what to do with source code, while the target audience of a programming language absolutely do, and have both the capability and desire to study an
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In many cases, selling more copies of the software is simply not the primary goal... The goal is to to increase mindshare, to increase the ecosystem to support other products. The more people who are developing applications for iOS and OSX the better for Apple.
In Apple's case, selling more copies of software is not a primary, nor even secondary, goal. Apple's goal is to sell more hardware, period.
And in that regard, that makes Apple, as a software developer/vendor, utterly unique in the entire computing industry.
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't profit from some of their software products; just that that isn't the goal. And I would be surprised if most of their software titles aren't continually "in the red". You have to sell a lot of copies of Final Cut/Comp
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The most common approach to this by companies like Red Hat and The Linux Foundation is to sell support and accreditation. Recently Google has pioneered a new model of incidental revenue by open sourcing code to generate market share and then using that code base to increase the exposure of it's proprietary software services.
So this
Re:It's good (Score:5, 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.
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I didn't hear applause, I heard a lot of laughter at the idea that this matters. The interest is mostly from people who are happy with the proprietary toolchains from the involved vendor.
I agree it is a good thing, though. But in a very, very tiny way. cups was important. This is not.
You need to go to your Otolaryngologist (ear-doctor).
They almost got a standing-ovation at the announcement that Swift 2 would be Open Sourced. I was by far the most enthusiastic audience reaction during the entire Keynote.
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The interest is mostly from people who are happy with the proprietary toolchains from the involved vendor.
That's true. You might also say the same about Microsoft opening some of its dev tools.
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I think it's not.
Given the general attitude of Apple (and its outright hostility towards the more "ideological" [1] flavours of Free Software [2], I must conclude this is just a strategical move, to regain control of some "markets" which now are more oriented towards Free.
If it pans out for Apple, it'll end up weakening the now strong and diverse Free Software movement, which in my book is a Very Bad Thing.
I distrust that bunch deeply. Take LLVM: the project itself is good, and makes us all richer, but the motives of Apple to stand behind it not so much.
I'd be glad to be convinced otherwise.
[1] let me label them so: IMHO all are ideological, just some hide behind "technical" which is ideology in disguise.
[2] cf. Apple not distributing the Gnu tools since they went GPLV3, to the detriment of their users, who are stuck with an old bash, an old Emacs and so on. Nothing in the GPLV3 prevents them from distributing that stuff. It's just sick corporate powerplay.
GPLv3 is shit. It is outright hostile to those who wish to redistribute or include products under that license. I have seen that very topic bandied-about several times right here on these pages. How dare you impute a sinister motive to that which large segments of the F/OSS Community also has a problem?
Just because Apple has some differences from your world-view does not make them the Axis of Evil, as you are implying. In fact, in response to concerns from the Community, Apple long-ago changed their own A
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GPLv3 is shit. It is outright hostile to those who wish to redistribute or include products under that license.
What part is hostile? If you want to do something like 'tivoisation,' it is hostile to you, if you want to use patents to sue people who use your source code it is also hostile.
Otherwise, if you just want to distribute source code, you will find no difficulty.
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While I agree that "GPLv3 is shit" is a bit harsh, I don't see Apple not adopting GPLv3 for its open source projects as a bad thing.
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You don't understand the difference between software licenses that are truly free
Arguing which license is 'truly free' is a moronic argument and depends wholly on how you define 'free.'
"An argument about the world is interesting, an argument about a word is not." --(I don't remember who said that but it's a good quote).
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You can't be truly free
You might as well just end the statement there. There are always limitations, you are not free to murder, for example; or more interestingly, travel to other galaxies, which is what I want to do.
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Linux Support (Score:4, 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.
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Gnustep? It's 2015, not 1993. If you want gnustep support write it yourself.
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I peaked in 1993 you insensitive clod.
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GNUStep is one path. It'd potentially be useful for porting apps from OSX to Linux.
Another is to create wrappers around another UI toolkit such as Qt, and create apps with that. That's for people that just want to use Swift for it's features, rather than because they want to port stuff.
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That's a good point....lack of libraries are one of the major things that stopped objective-C adoption as well.
well, that and the fact that it's shit.
Compared to what, exactly? C++ ???
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I'm sorry, but I don't get the reasoning behind your evaluation. I'm not greatly familiar with Objective C, but the only reason that I didn't pick it up in the past was that other languages had better documentation. (I'm not using an Apple).
Even GnuStep wasn't that bad. It was better at handling unicode than C libraries were. But too many pieces assumed that you had someone at hand to explain basics to you.
So I used Python and D and Java. I looked at Vala, but it seems too tightly bound up with gtk, and
Re:Linux Support (Score:5, 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.
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I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings.
I think it will be pretty straightforward: OpenStep already exists, which is already ObjC and the same model as OSX/iOS, given the same NextStep heritage.
AFAICT, Swift is essentially the ObjC machine and object model in a sane language, so it ought to plug right into OpenStep.
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I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings.
I think it will be pretty straightforward: OpenStep already exists, which is already ObjC and the same model as OSX/iOS, given the same NextStep heritage.
AFAICT, Swift is essentially the ObjC machine and object model in a sane language, so it ought to plug right into OpenStep.
It's nice if that is true, but experience has taught me to believe that when I see my iOS/OS X program plug straight into OpenStep and compile, ready for deployment on Linux PCs and Mobile devices.
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Close. So close.
LLVM, not ObjC. Swift is basically is an interface to LLVM. Chris Lattner, one of the major people behind LLVM, works at Apple and created Swift.
Open source language (Score:3)
> 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.
I would never consider a closed language for anything else than small, short-lifetime hacks which I do not intend to maintain.
Re:Open source language (Score:4, 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.
Re: Open source language (Score:3)
Just because a language is open source doesn't mean it's not still controlled by a single entity. Nowdays, a language needs a good framework to go along with it, and as we're seeing with Oracle v Google, just because something is open source doesn't mean anyone can just pick it up and run with it. And even if they could, there's no guarentee that someone would pick up your favorite language/framework and continue to support it.
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You aren't a professional developer then, making your opinion on this topic less than useless.
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Well, a large part of my job is to develop software (although usually not the pointy-clicky/touchy if-this-then-that type), so your comment is both wrong and very useless.
i was just thinking... (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".
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> Open sourcing is a good first step toward making Swift a candidate for replacing C++ and Java,
It helps Swift replace Objective-C. Why would you think Swift is appropriate to "replace" C++ or Java?
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Yes a programming language specifically designed like a walled garden or more like a labor camp.
Only an insensitive dickhead like you, with no idea of what a real "labor camp" is would make such a ridiculous analogy.
Go read some history before you throw around the term "labor camp". It is deeply insulting to those who had family members who actually lived (and usually died) in labor camps.
Re:i was just thinking... (Score:4, 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.
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Anything is better than JavaScript. The world would be a much better place with something like TypeScript but children don't want to play in the same sandbox together so we're stuck with this until Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla grow up and start working together.
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If you enjoy 1970's technology, try translating BASIC games [atariarchives.org] into Python. That's an exercise in unraveling spaghetti code, chasing GOTO statements, and figuring out what parts of the code was to get around hardware limitations.
You CAN write nicely structure, well-documented code in almost any language, including BASIC and Assembly. I know, I've done it many, many times. It is simply that some languages ALLOW sloppy programming techniques, and that some developers write sloppy, undocumented code.
Don't blame the language; blame the developer.
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I wasn't assigning blame to either the language or the developer. What I'm doing to learn Python better is revisiting the BASIC games of my misbegotten youth from 30 years ago. Some of these programs were submitted by readers of Creative Computing magazine, written for the DEC PDP minicomputers, or floating around the university computer labs at Dartmouth, Berkeley or Stanford. Translating the classics into a modern language is a bit of challenge.
The Dice [atariarchives.org] program warns that rolling the dice 5,000+ times wil
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Funny, because I was just thinking, what the computing industry really needs is stagnation.
All joking apart, I think it could do with a slow down. We've already got a growing gulf between the bleeding edge and the mission-critical users who need a year or two just to test and plan migration to a new OS. Start a 2-year project on a new development platform and you're two major, often incompatible, releases behind by the end of the project. You end up with a workforce bifurcated between the old legacy project people with wisdom and experience but out-of-date technical knowledge, and the bright, yo
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That's how things like NoSQL, significant whitespace, binary log files and flat mystery-meat UIs happen.
Regarding your examples: Is NoSQL bad? I've never dealt with it, but was under the impression that it was pretty good for particular things, but perhaps being implemented too widely by people who are overenthusiastic. Significant whitespace is just dumb. The concept of binary log files don't necessarily seem bad to me, if we have a universal format with high-quality tools to access them.
And I actually tend to favor the "flat mystery-meat UIs" when executed well rather than trying to make everything look
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5-10 years of stagnation. Hurrah! Time to refine designs, sort out that crufty code you've been meaning to fix for 10 years, deal with 10-year-old feature requests and sort out interoperability, [...]
Not to change the subject; but that's EXACTLY why I was so happy to NOT see an endless parade of "new technologies" and "4,000 new APIs" in yesterday's OS X and iOS Keynote presentations. Ya gotta show off something new; but I think that Apple has "gotten" the idea, at least internally, that they can/should take a pause and firm-up what is there, before starting any new paradigm-changing/life-changing feature-sets. That is why, IMHO, you see them talking about better performance, overall. They are internall
Wrong comparision (Score:5, 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.
Open source isn't enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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I completely agree. Apple have said they will release the standard library, which is tiny and apparently doesn't even have file or socket I/O.
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So you're whining now that the cake you're given for free hasn't got cream on top. Remember, the open source idea isn's supposed to be about just taking. If you want more libraries, make them.
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Correct. Frankly that is what killed Objective C. Languages really stopped mattering about 20 years ago. It is all about the libraries.
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Whilst we're still getting dereferencing of null and buffer overflows, the choice of out-dated languages such as C/C++ very much matters.
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Yet C/C++ is still being day in and day out.
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Indeed. There hasn't been anything to replace it with till now.
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The language alone is not good enough, but it is simple to share. By contrast, building a complete web browser today is a bit difficult [slashdot.org], and even a smaller "graphic" language like Tao3D [sf.net] is not that easy to build, in particular if you include all the dependencies. For Tao3D, you need Qt with WebKit, OpenGL, VLC, XLR, LLVM and I forget half a dozen. So I think that exposing the language-only part is interesting. For a while, Tao3D was the same project as XLR, but we decided to split early on. We wanted XLR to
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The last time I looked into using Objective C on a Linux system the documentation of both Objective C and GnuStep were lamentable. So bad I picked up something else.
I'll agree it's a difficult problem, but Python, Ruby, D, and even Smalltalk (well Squeak, anyway) and Scheme (Racket anyway) have addressed it reasonably. Objective C documentation seems to only work if you're on an Apple, and GnuStep documentation doesn't seem to work anywhere. It's great if you just want something to remind you of how to d
Use in other than the "Walled Garden"...Yes (Score:3)
http://elementscompiler.com/el... [elementscompiler.com]
RemObjects has developed an implementation of Swift in a product called "Silver" that, per their website, claims:
"With Silver, you can use Swift to write code directly against the .NET, Java, Android and Cocoa APIs. And you can also share a lot of non-UI code between platforms."
Their implementation isn't open source...but, the tool and their implementation are free.
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There's already Microsoft SilverLight, so why the hell did RemObjects pick "Silver" for the name of their product?
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http://elementscompiler.com/el... [elementscompiler.com]
RemObjects has developed an implementation of Swift in a product called "Silver" that, per their website, claims:
"With Silver, you can use Swift to write code directly against the .NET, Java, Android and Cocoa APIs. And you can also share a lot of non-UI code between platforms."
Their implementation isn't open source...but, the tool and their implementation are free.
Well, there's your proof that Apple doesn't intend to prosecute anyone regarding Swift.
If Apple isn't going to prosecute someone who reverse-engineered Swift BEFORE it was Open-Sourced, then they sure as HELL aren't going to go after anyone AFTER they release it as Open Source.
Amirite?
iOS Dev on Windows (Score:4, 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?
Never happen and I don't blame them. (Score:2)
Why would they bite off on the hassle of supporting their dev environment running on a bunch of incompatible Linux distributions? (not to mention Windows).
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Well most creatives for a start.
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Well most creatives for a start.
Not to mention a significant number of Linux Devs, too.
Most people who own Macs don't develop iOS apps. (Score:2)
You know that, right?
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Who would ever buy a Mac then? Apple's not going to further jeopardize the Mac platform that way.
Just just a sarcastic little hater, aren't you?
Begone from this thread, if all you have to contribute is hate.
Seriously.
Not an Apple first (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has a much longer history of releasing open source or opening standards than most people like to give them credit for.
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"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.
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So that's your one example of one that didn't pan out. Does that somehow cancel out the many open source projects that Apple has released?
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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
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Thank you, that's the first time I hear about that.
Re:Not an Apple first (Score:4, 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 [imore.com] 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.
Wrong "critical question" (Score:3)
the critical question for a programming language is... whether it's feasible to make open source software with it
I don't see any clear reason to think that it wouldn't be feasible to make open source software. They're releasing some kind of development kit for Linux, claiming that the released materials will be open sourced under a permissive license. Now they could by lying, or they might have a crazy idea about what constitutes a "permissive license", but otherwise, how could it not be feasible to make open source software with it? Even if their tools are somehow geared toward developing Mac apps, if they're open sourced, those tools can be rewritten.
It seems to me that the question that's more critical is, "Will the open source community want to use this language?" I don't know the answer to that.
Ho-hum (Score:2)
So what.
People who are heavily invested in Apple and Apple development are going to be ecstatic because they think it will mean a groundswell of openings for Swift.
I remember the creation of mono and the open sourcing of ,Net which were supposed to do the same for .Net programming. Did that happen? A bit not nowhere near wht they were hoping for.
In the end Swift will be another niche language, which just a slightly bigger niche.
FaceTime (Score:4, 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.
Re:Odd that they highlight those projects (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
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).
Apple supported the development of clang (and LLVM) precisely because Apple realized it was too much work to elevate the GNU toolchain above its longstanding (and continuing) mediocre status.
It is nothing but good for the F/OSS community that Apple decided to continue the F/OSS status of LLVM and clang, and every single F/OSS Developer should be genuflecting on a daily basis to Chris Lattner and Apple for doing so.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess when I code something in C for an Atmel microcontroller I'm just glueing a bunch of nothingness together. But it still works! It's magic!
Re: (Score:3)
What do you imagine is stopping people?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Swift is a company language, and people will perceive it that way for a long time. Even if it finally jumps over the fence of Apple's walled garden, it will be only incidentally done. Look at Lua, originally a company language for PetroBras. It never became mainstream.
And exactly whose fault was that?
Re: (Score:2)
Lua is the most used language for the purpose it was intended - for adding custom scripting to applications. It's a huge success.
Re: (Score:2)
The real value of Swift will be whether it can realistically be used anywhere but Apple's walled garden.
This could by answered with an emphatic "no".
Amazing that you can be so sure of that; considering that the Open Source version of Swift is still months away.
Or did you get your hands on the Beta of WatchOS 2 and travel to the future to check it out?
Re:reasons for doing so (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
+ created by USG.
That should be news to Mssrs. K & R. Didn't they work for Bell Labs at the time, and wasn't C simply supposed to be an internal language for the development of "The Phone Company" system-code?
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who were the owners of bell labs ?
Um, AT&T, which had been a publicly-held company for many decades before the first commercially-available computer was even sold.
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So when I politely explain that I've been using microphones and talking with "team members" since the late 1990's, and even had web cams in the days where you stuck them on top of your CRT based monitor! Oh, and it was all for free. To which the look of puzzlement and surprise went across their face. Because in their mind, and that of so many of the public, Apple brings these things to the world, and not just their own flavour of it.
That skips a whole bunch of tears on the part of most of the people who tried to get that actually working back then.
What Apple did with Facetime was make all that drop-dead-simple; so that Everyperson(tm) could make it happen without having to traverse a nightmare of setup.
So, your condescending "polite explanation" was nothing more than the thinly-veiled conceit of the "Computer Priesthood"; which neatly ignored the accomplishments of some pretty-damned-hardworking Developers at Apple, who made the wh
Re: (Score:2)
It will be open source to the point where someone tries to use it in competition with Apple. At which point, the lawyers will come in and kill the project with cease and desist letters regarding APIs, copyrighted names, etc.
Oh, come off it!
If Apple Open Sources the Language, then they wouldn't last past the first Motion To Dismiss in Court. As long as the usage doesn't violate the terms of the whatever Open Source License Apple releases Swift 2 under, then they have no actionable claims, period.
And of course, the "competitor" can clearly see the terms of the License LONG before that would be an issue.
Not to mention the credibility Apple would lose in the entire F/OSS Community if they tried that kind of bait-and-switch t