Apple is "open sourcing" Swift. Your thoughts?
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http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-does-apple-get-out-of-taking-swift-open-source/
http://readwrite.com/2015/06/09/apple-swift-open-source-wwdc2015
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/08/swift-open-source/
As you may or may not know, Swift is a new programming language set to replace Objective-C in programming for the Mac and iOS platforms. It is supposed to be easier to program and according to Wikipedia, "Swift took language ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list"
With Apple's recent WWDC, they announced that they would make Swift "open source" and available for "Linux platforms" in 2015. If it is the natural evolution of Objective-C and since Objective-C support on GNU/Linux is pretty terrible, maybe this will help some developers in coding without investing in locked down and overpriced Apple hardware and operating systems. Especially if they make all of the language open and don't make important feature only available to Apple platforms (like Cocoa/Objective-C), then this could be a good thing right?
Apple: Work for us for free!
name at domain wrote:
> Apple: Work for us for free!
Sadly this could very well be the case, and those who fall for the open
source story (remember, so far nothing has been released under an
OSI-approved license yet) will not be given a reason for Apple's choice.
I think Brad Kuhn has it in one --
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/06/15/apple-is-not-our-friend.html --
reiterating some of his points:
- Apple has said nothing about patents in the publicity on this and will
likely choose a license that does not protect the user's interest in
gaining a patent grant. Patents, after all, represent another way to
leverage control over others.[1]
- Apple hates strongly copylefted free software they don't hold the
copyright on because they know what can happen when they infringe a
copyright. They bought Easy Software (programmers of CUPS) because they
didn't want to be a GPL licensee. They dropped the GPL'd Samba and went
with their own SMB reimplementation. They pursue the non-copylefted Free
Software LLVM even back when LLVM posed no technical reason to favor it
over GCC so that Apple can lure developers into using their proprietary
fork. Kuhn says "their goal is to end copyleft compilers" and I think
time will show he's right.
- The people at the head of Apple now were the people heading up NeXT
when NeXT violated the GPL distributing their infringing GCC derivative
with non-free Objective-C support.
- Apple uses non-copyleft free software licenses as come-ons for
trapping oneself by becoming dependent on non-freedom. I'm disappointed
in how many developers I talk with tell me they think rather shallowly
about these issues in that they don't see the trap until they're in it.
[2]
http://consumerist.com/2010/06/privacy-change-apple-knows-your-phone-is-and-is-telling-people.html
-- as Richard Stallman points out in
https://stallman.org/archives/2010-may-aug.html#24%20June%202010%20%28Apple%20sells%20more%20data%20on%20customers%29
> If you carry a cell phone, it tells Big Brother where you are. Now
> Apple wants to hand out the information too.
>
> Using the lever of "You have a choice, but unless you say yes, your
> old activities will stop working" is something that Apple has done
> before, with malicious "upgrades". Apple ostensibly doesn't force
> people to accept the new nasty thing; it just punishes them if they
> don't.
The articles don't mention what is going to be open source (a compiler, a debugger, an IDE, an implementation of the standard library, or what else?). As usual, those who talk about open source don't know what the term means and misapply it. Open source is a property that software may possess, but not programming languages (they have no source to speak of, implementations do). The question should be whether the software is going to be free as in freedom.
Article writers in this type of journals are already too sloppy to know what open source is, let alone comprehend the importance of free software. These article writers don't want to see beyond their nose. When a new digital jail is released (traitor devices like computer phones, “iThings” or proprietary software) they are quick to appraise it for what it looks like, without realizing that it is just another way of putting the general public under corporate control. The use I see for any of these journals is to know what some of the latest artifices to deceive and exploit customers are.
Apple does occasionally releases software that can be useful in a fully free system like CUPS. However, at a glance, this gives me the impression that they are just looking to provide an open source bait for any developer who would take it, so that then he develops software that runs within the software framework of Apple; then Apple can subjugate the users of that software and possibly the baited developer too.
We have many other competing, free languages that are even openly developed, like Rust, Python, Ruby, Go, ...
It's not like we lack programming languages. :)
> "It's not like we lack programming languages. :)"
You can say that again :P
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