Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/06/15/apple-is-not-our-friend.html

by bonzini • 11 years ago

421 312 11 years ago

owenwil• 11 years ago

This seems a little extreme.

"To me, Apple's not-yet-executed move to liberate some of the Swift 2.0 code seems a tactical stunt to win over developers who currently prefer the relatively more open nature of the Android/Linux platform."

They said why this was the case -- Swift 2.0 isn't finished yet -- but have pledged to open-source the entire thing.

wumbernang• 11 years ago

It isn't happening until it has happened.

Also sure a compiler may drop but its useless without a pile of libs.

glandium2• 11 years ago

They said why this was the case -- Swift 2.0 isn't finished yet

You know what else isn't finished? The vast majority of open-source software. You don't need something to be finished to open-source it. That feels like the Android model to open-source: source code dumps at convenient times. The only valid reason not to open-source when you say you will is that you don't have all the copyright to do so, and are actively rewriting the bits you can't open-source.

cmsj15• 11 years ago

That is really a separate question though. Open Source is simply about licensing of a software release, it says nothing about the nature of the development community that produced the software.

An open, collaborative development community in an Open Source or Free Software project, is a very good thing, but it is a separate thing.

shiggerino8• 11 years ago

What they have done is pledge to kill software freedom. Whether they release Swift 2.0 now or later is irrelevant.

antimagic• 11 years ago

Please feel free to provide us with a link to this "pledge". As far as I'm aware, Apple has never done any such thing.

cmsj15• 11 years ago

I don't think you have any evidence of such a pledge.

Personally, I think Apple doesn't give a fig about software freedom. I don't think they are in favour of it, or against it, they simply want to ship their products.

For a time they were happy to use GPL software to help them do that, but then v3 happened and they have been moving away from the projects that switched to v3.

It's impossible to argue that WebKit, LLVM, Swift, etc. are intended "to kill software freedom". They are simply software projects that exist and release code under an OSI license (or will do, in the case of Swift).

If Apple/Google/others can push these projects beyond where things like GCC are, that is more the fault of the GCC project for not being nimble enough to stay on the leading edge (if it ever was there). It's also not because they are determined to kill projects like GCC, it's because they need really good compilers/renderers/etc.

belorn4• 11 years ago

What is a finished software product? One that no longer get patched and supported, or is it when a "gold" copy get sent to the factories to be mass-copied and sent to stores?

I understand the concept when it comes to games, since a finished product is one where the developers has switched over to the next product and only occasional maintenance patches are added post-launch. It makes sense to call those finished, but a programming language that does this would likely be called dead.

kybernetyk5• 11 years ago

What is a finished software product?

One that meets a pre-defined milestone and is seen fit for public release. I guess Apple wants to get some warts out and add a few features before it releases the project to the "design by committee" open source world.

bitserf• 11 years ago

It's highly unlikely that Apple will release any code under an FSF license, ever. The FSF needs to make their peace with that, no shrill screeds are going to change that.

And frankly, if there's going to be a new, modern, high quality language with support for the platforms I care about (Linux, OS X), I'm going to use it.

I wonder if RMS is going to publish a Swift version of "The Java Trap". I don't think it will meet with the same result (relicensing under the GPL).

itaysk2• 11 years ago

"modern, high quality language with support for the platforms I care about (Linux, OS X)" - .NET's open sourcing is already happening (including cross-platform) and is under MIT\Apache license. github.com/dotnet

cmsj15• 11 years ago

Bradley is pretty extreme :)

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have sentinels out on the fringes, like RMS and Bradley, to remind us not to get lost. We don't have to go where they are, but we can at least navigate by them.

Having said that, there is a detail here which Bradley is omitting. Specifically, that is that Apple is not anti-copyleft, what Apple is (and what many other corporations are), is anti-GPLv3.

Apple shipped Samba for a very long time. They could have replaced it at any point, but they didn't need to. It was Samba switching to GPLv3 that pushed Apple into writing its own SMB implementation.

Now, it's possible that these things are unrelated, but I believe I am correct in stating that Apple has never shipped GPLv3 software, and anything that has switched to v3, simply gets replaced or held back at its last v2 release (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990 ). The most likely explanation is that they are not prepared to be bound by the patent/tivoisation clauses.

The deeper question is why these v3 terms are unacceptable. IANAL, but I have worked at places where there are pretty flexible policies around using/distributing Free Software, and it's not at all uncommon that blanket policies apply to v2 licensed software, but any and all use of v3 (or indeed AGPL) software require specific individual review by Legal to ensure that you aren't placing the company in an actionable position. That's a pretty heavy time/effort burden to place on the (ideally nimble) process of developing and shipping software, it's also a cost burden.

Personally, I love the GPLv2, I think it's a masterstroke of a license. I don't use it very much anymore, but I'm very glad that exists. I think v3 goes to far, and I think AGPL goes way too far.

I tend to think that there are strategic projects which should be under v3, to protect the wider Free Software community from being unreasonably locked out of their own future, however, it seems fairly clear to me that overall, v3 has hurt copyleft more than helped it.

xerophyte12932• 11 years ago

If it's not too much trouble, could you please this part:

Personally, I love the GPLv2, I think it's a masterstroke of a license. I don't use it very much anymore, but I'm very glad that exists. I think v3 goes to far, and I think AGPL goes way too far.

I am really not familiar with licenses and I have a feeling the legal text won't make much sense to me either if I treid reading it by my self

anon13856• 11 years ago

Now, it's possible that these things are unrelated, but I believe I am correct in stating that Apple has never shipped GPLv3 software, and anything that has switched to v3, simply gets replaced or held back at its last v2 release (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990 ). The most likely explanation is that they are not prepared to be bound by the patent/tivoisation clauses.

Apple have been pretty open about why they don't like the GPLv3. It's not actually the patent clauses at all (their own Apple Public Source License predates the GPLv3 by several years and includes a patent grant): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8868994

Unfortunately this bis of misinformation has become part of the public consciousness.

jasonlotito5• 11 years ago

Pledges from Apple are worthless. One need only look to FaceTime as an example.

chrisoverzero• 11 years ago

They lost a lawsuit, so they had to cancel that.

tddfuckwitz• 11 years ago

To be fair, you don't have to use LLVM or Swift, if you don't want to - there are other compilers and languages out there, some already cross platform (hello C++).

I understand the unhappiness though that so called techies and developers these days do not question anything anymore. They just take what they are spoon-fed and ask for more of the same.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

we should expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent grant.

How come? Does Apple have a history of licensing open source software and making it unusable with patents? I can't say I'd be surprised, but it would be news to me. Is Webkit a counter-example, I don't think they've chased Google about patents?

inglor3• 11 years ago

I don't blame them after what Google did with Chrome from all the hard work they poured into WebKit. Especially since they later forked it into a separate project.

So while this is a programming language and such an issue is not likely to rise here - I can see why Apple would be very cautious in this case.

cromwellian• 11 years ago

1) Forking in open source is not a crime, it is a virtue and fundamental right

2) By "after what Google did with Chrome", do you mean contributing massive amounts of engineering resources to WebKit for several years, exceeding Apple's own WebKit team? Look here: http://www.kaizou.org/2013/04/why-google-dropped-webkit/

If someone's forking your project, it's usually because productivity/velocity is going down because of either too much political contention, or too much legacy code.

inglor3• 11 years ago

Right, for the code base it is good - from Apple's PoV however they lost market-share in a billions-of-dollars market

s73v3r4• 11 years ago

Lots of things aren't crimes. Doesn't mean that there might be some ethical questions to it.

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

The bulk of WebKit is under a liberal license, similar to what they'll likely use for Swift. Google could do exactly the same with Swift if it felt like this (though in practice forking language compilers/runtimes rarely makes that much sense).

Perceptes• 11 years ago

This isn't a compelling argument for anyone like me who doesn't think copyleft licensing is some grand virtue. If they haven't violated the licenses of software they're using, I don't see a problem. They're under no obligation to open anything at all to the public, and shouldn't be.

cmsj15• 11 years ago

FWIW, I don't think Bradley is claiming that they are under any obligation here.

kybernetyk5• 11 years ago

This kind of texts always reminds me of political/religious pamphlets.

If you love freedom so much why don't you just let people release their software under a license they seem appropriate and you release your software under copyleft?

If Apple's not your friend don't play with them. Don't try to force them into a friendship.

rogerbraun7• 11 years ago

It's about educating developers to make an informed decision. I don't know why that's supposed to be religious.

matthewmacleod7• 11 years ago

I guess it's the abstract, evangelical nature of it that makes it comparable to religion in some ways.

The implicit assumption you're making is that developers are not making an informed decision already. I reckon that's not the case, and the developers are informed – they just don't care.

Arguments about long-term, abstract concepts like enduring freedom of software, or the risk of patent litigation for using non-copyleft software, are valuable to have. But these things have a limited impact in the short-term, day-to-day work of developers.

cactusface4• 11 years ago

It's proselytizing.

kybernetyk5• 11 years ago

I didn't say it's religious. I just said it reminds me of a religious black&white world view: There's the bad thing that will land you in hell and then there's our thing that will save your soul.

Don't know. It's the whole style. Phrases like "Apple's pathological hatred of copyleft" just don't sit well with me. If you want to educate me: fine, do it. But at least try to avoid sounding like a fanatic.

stephenr7• 11 years ago

The problem is that posts like this one strongly suggest that anything but a decision to fully embrace the GPL is somehow wrong.

d_theorist2• 11 years ago

I think a better word might be bigoted. The author seems to have strong intolerance for anybody who doesn't share his precise view of software licensing.

madeofpalk• 11 years ago

I think to me its so about how preachy it all is. It's summed up by me with

their goal is to end copyleft compilers.

Copyleft has nothing to do with this. Apple just want to make a better compiler. If a copyleft compiler is thrown by the wayside in the process, or they choose not to release under a copyleft license, that's just collateral.

Stop being so preachy and making Apple out to be malicious. They just don't care.

pron11• 11 years ago

This is a political statement, and I think it's a good one. Politics means the struggle over power distribution in society. It is an unqualified good thing! Some people don't like the game of statesmanship, namely how people bargain over politics, but that's a whole other matter altogether. Politics means defining to ourselves what our goals are. For example, if you say that we as a society should invest in technology because technology can make people's lives better then you've just made a political statement (a very vague one, but undeniably political). Anything that states what we should do as a society -- as opposed to, say, stating what is -- is by definition political.

And by the way, political statements are different from religious ones (though the two may overlap). This is not a religious statement.

The answer to your question (which is also a veiled political statement) is that allowing non-free modification and distribution would go against the political goals of the article's author, who believes that when it comes to software freedoms, all liberties should be granted except for the liberty to restrict that freedom. You may not agree with that political ideology, but it certainly makes sense (but bear in mind that disagreeing with this ideology isn't lack of ideology -- which is impossible if you have an opinion on what we should do -- but merely a different one).

baddox3• 11 years ago

If you love freedom so much why don't you just let people release their software under a license they seem appropriate and you release your software under copyleft?

"Freedom" is only defined in terms of one's beliefs about human rights. Some people (myself not included) believe that they have a right to view and modify the source code of all software they interact with in any capacity. To those people, there is no "freedom to release software under a license they seem appropriate," because the only licenses that do not violate what they perceive to be their rights are open source licenses.

kybernetyk5• 11 years ago

Ok, there's two alternatives then:

1) Don't interact with said software if it doesn't fit into your concept of freedom.

2) Write the software yourself.

But forcing someone to release their software in way they don't want to isn't one of those alternatives. (Your freedom ends where my freedom begins).

s73v3r4• 11 years ago

The problem with that line of thinking in general (not just limited to this topic) is that it ignores externalities. It takes the libertarian stance that a man is an island.

matthewmacleod7• 11 years ago

It's frustrating to see this somewhat blinkered view.

Yeah, Apple definitely doesn't like copyleft. That's okay; lots of people don't (especially larger companies – how many large companies actively release GPLd software?). It's a legitimate business decision, and there are some good arguments that support it (which you may or may not agree with).

The idea that organisations 'owe' the community copyleft software is therefore a bit foreign to me.

Furthermore:

We'll likely see pieces of Swift 2.0 thrown over the wall. But the best stuff will be kept proprietary.

That's a bit of a weird assumption. Apple's statement was the the Swift code and standard library would be open-sourced. What is the 'best stuff' that we're not going to get?

Apple's not-yet-executed move to liberate some of the Swift 2.0 code seems a tactical stunt to win over developers who currently prefer the relatively more open nature of the Android/Linux platform … the copyleft license of Linux itself provides the opportunity to keep the core operating system of Android liberated.

That's a bit flaccid. Google and the Android platform has equally went out of the way to isolate the platform from the effects of the GPL. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Bionic (the Android libc) exists is specifically to limit the impact of GPL code on the platform. Android's use of Linux is basically a historical accident, and painting it as some kind of concerted effort towards software freedom isn't a compelling point.

TL;DR - you need to relax. Apple releasing open-source code is a good thing. We can now all benefit from using this code. Maybe you'd prefer if it were copylefted, but it's not – it's still good, and painting it as an evil move against software freedom seems like a bit of a mental stretch.

cmsj15• 11 years ago

The best stuff that we're not going to get, is everything above the STL, but I doubt anyone is expecting that Foundation/Cocoa are going to get open sourced any time soon :)

glandium2• 11 years ago

and all the IDE sugar from Xcode.

terhechte• 11 years ago

Well, a good part of Foundation (Core Foundation) is already open source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-855.17/

pixxa2• 11 years ago

"Best stuff" depends on who "we" are...

Here are some other users who may feel they are getting the "best stuff":

Compiler designers, programming language researchers, or even CS students the Swift core is a fount of of information to learn from, modify, experiment.

Teachers whose school could not afford Macs. They can now use Swift on cheap Linux machines, and eventually on Windows.

...

pron11• 11 years ago

The idea that organisations 'owe' the community copyleft software is therefore a bit foreign to me.

What do you mean? That is the very credo of free software, namely all software should be free. Hence, everybody owes the community free software. You might not agree with it, but that's the ideology behind free software.

Google and the Android platform has equally went out of the way to isolate the platform from the effects of the GPL.

That's absolutely true. That effort is why Google didn't use OpenJDK (which is under the GPL), which led to Oracle suing them. All because Google went to extreme great lengths to avoid the GPL (they did have their reasons: they believed, perhaps rightly so, that phone manufacturers would not agree to a GPL platform).

Flimm5• 11 years ago

I think the credo of free software is the developers owe their users free software, not the community at large. It's a subtle distinction.

fauigerzigerk6• 11 years ago

Hence, everybody owes the community free software.

I think the credo is that developers owe the users of their software certain privileges, like access to source code and the right to modify and redistribute that source code.

What I don't like about the way the free software movement demands these rights is the misuse of the words freedom and liberty. By using these words, they deliberately imply that withholding these privileges from users is tantamount to a human rights violation.

I think that is an insult to people suffering from real human rights violations.

zak_mc_kracken7• 11 years ago

The reason why Google went with writing their own version of Java has nothing to do with avoiding the GPL and everything to do with avoiding to have to pay money to Sun.

masklinn• 11 years ago

That's a bit of a weird assumption. Apple's statement was the the Swift code and standard library would be open-sourced. What is the 'best stuff' that we're not going to get?

I'd expect Foundation and other Cocoa stuff (Core Data and the like) will not be part of the package.

sneak• 11 years ago

Yes, but when people say "Swift" they are talking about the language, not Cocoa.

b00gizm2• 11 years ago

Well... yeah, because Foundation and UIKit / AppKit is not part of the Swift stdlib?

fauigerzigerk6• 11 years ago

I think that's the crucial point. If they do not at least include things like networking, multithreading and file system access from Foundation then server-side Swift will either not happen for a long time or it will be very fragmented.

jahewson4• 11 years ago

Core Foundation is open source and has been for at least seven years.

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

As mentioned elsewhere, Core Foundation is open source (http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-635.19/), though IIRC only parts of it currently work on Linux. Calling Core Data "Apple's best stuff" is a serious stretch, if you have ever used Core Data :)

belorn4• 11 years ago

I find that limiting a companies usage of available tools based on policy decision is a bad business decision. Industries that have plenty of competition tend to discard of such attitudes, since there will always be someone willing to save money whenever possible.

Take games. While a game will likely not use GPL in the product since it would conflict with the basic model of selling licenses of copyrighted content, even a large industry actor like blizzard will use LGPL in their flagship products (like starcraft 2) if it saves them developer time. They don't seem very upset, or a failure, to have to distribute source code of those parts. It seems a very legitimate business decision to make decision based on increasing revenue and decreasing costs, and a illegitimate business decision to increase costs because for fear of "licenses" when it does not conflict with their revenue flow.

I would claim there is some good arguments (which people may or may not agree with) that any like or dislikes that companies has that is not PR based or revenue/cost based is illegitimate business decision that a market economy should replace.

DanielBMarkham• 11 years ago

I would claim there is some good arguments (which people may or may not agree with) that any like or dislikes that companies has that is not PR based or revenue/cost based is illegitimate business decision that a market economy should replace.

That's a nice summary.

Been thinking lately about "business bugs". As technology developers, we're all familiar with technology bugs: system crashes, system runs too slow, system does something unexpected.

It occurs to me that there are business bugs as well. Business takes too long, business solves the wrong problem, and so on.

Perhaps the entire raison d'être of Lean Startup is to apply ATDD at the business execution level.

matthewmacleod7• 11 years ago

I find that limiting a companies usage of available tools based on policy decision is a bad business decision.

Oh, I completely agree with that. I'll never forget a particularly frustrating conversation with a client who refused to allow access to their database, because we were using 'open source code that anybody could have changed'. That sort of thing – banning open-source software from your systems – is silly.

However, you've got to consider the default-conservative attitude of larger companies. In Apple's case for example, the breaking point seems to have been GPLv3 - this was when they started reimplementing things like Samba and removing copylefted software. And that's because the GPLv3 represents a real business risk – aside from the direct patent implications, litigation under it is sparse, and businesses don't like operating in unsure legal territory!

laumars6• 11 years ago

Yeah, Apple definitely doesn't like copyleft. That's okay; lots of people don't (especially larger companies – how many large companies actively release GPLd software?). It's a legitimate business decision, and there are some good arguments that support it (which you may or may not agree with).

While I do agree with your point, I do also find it frustrating when businesses' are quick to base their core components on copyleft licensed code (eg CUPS, kHTML, Mach, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Apache httpd, many GNU projects, and much more https://www.apple.com/opensource/), often only releasing patches because of their legal obvigation. Yet they are quicker to hoard their own technologies claiming they've "innovated" the industry and that their technology "works like magic".

It feels extremely disingenuous and I think that's why Apple is met with such criticism and skepticism by their critics.

I appreciate that there are other companies who mix and match open with closed proprietary solutions, but Apple seem to me to be the worst and most aggressive for exaggerating the significance and originality of their own proprietary code relative to the amount of copyleft code they depend on to run their software stack.

edit: s/copyleft/open source/g Sorry for the school boy error

Ensorceled4• 11 years ago

Wait, what? Mach, Apache, OpenSSH, OpenSSL are all under Apache/BSD style licenses, not "copyleft" GPL licenses. You clearly don't understand the issues being discussed here; for at least those projects things are working exactly as intended.

matthewmacleod7• 11 years ago

I understand what you're saying, but there's some confusion there – of the projects you've listed, none of Mach, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and Apache are copylefted – they all use permissive licensed. And regarding CUPS and Webkit/kHTML, I think it's difficult to argue that Apple 'only released patches because of their legal obligation' – they were the primary developers of those projects.

But more importantly, I don't think it is a disingenuous complaint, and it's the basis of most commercial software. I build software – we release some component parts as open-source, which the proprietary bits on top are how we can make value. And it seems like that benefits everybody!

jorgecastillo4• 11 years ago

CUPS is owned by Apple. Mach, OpenSSH, OpenSSL & Apache are not copyleft. The success of Apple has nothing to do with the copyleft software they use, most code used by Apple has been based on permissively licensed code or written by them. The main software asset Apple has is Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, which are as far from copyleft as you can get. Apple could replace every piece of copyleft software they have left in OS X tomorrow and no mainstream news source would bother to inform of this. That's how relevant copyleft software is to the success of Apple.

Now if you say "open source has been an integral part on the success of Apple", I would agree with that. Still Apple owes its success to it's own code not to code from others. If taking open source code and modifying it a little was all it took to make a successful company, all of us would be millionaires.

parasubvert4• 11 years ago

"Apple seem to me to be the worst and most aggressive for exaggerating the significance and originality of their own proprietary code relative to the amount of copyleft code they depend on to run their software stack."

I'm finding this hard to parse. Mix & match is okay, so long as you don't promote what you feel makes you special? I don't get it, this seems to be an emotional reaction to the fact Apple is still doing so well vs. more open source (Android) approaches.

Herein lies the crux of the competitive manner. In what possible way is Apple's success with their proprietary code and processes exaggerated? I mean, Apple might market in a way you find distasteful, but facts are facts - Apple has been wildly successful in profitability, largely because of their proprietary ability to design great holistic user experiences that people like to use. This isn't because of marketing and brainwashing solely, as the products do mostly work really well, with some debate around overall quality lately.

The Google/Android ecosystem has access to the same open source base Apple does, and they've wound up in a different competitive situation - high marketshare, no direct profits on Android itself. Everything is driven by compliments, like Ads. Perhaps that's part the point of open source - to drive out direct profits on a core set of capabilities. But why hasn't it worked on Apple?

I think the issue is not solely about code, it's about ecosystem and all the proprietary bits surrounding that (The Apple Store, the app store, their hardware devices, the Genius Bar experience...). Apple has managed to build a very appealing proprietary ecosystem to both users because of the experience, and developers because of the overall architecture of the app store and potential for $$$.

All of this is not about exaggeration and "it's magic" stuff, it's about very smart people thinking through how they're going to compete against an ecosystem that doesn't want to make any money.

nickysielicki3• 11 years ago

Imagine Swift becomes a wild success; everyone's writing everything in Swift. What will your reaction be when Apple again makes a "legitimate business decision" and leverages the success to the benefit of their company and implicitly disadvantages other platforms? Maybe they double up on Swift support on Mac and start shipping additional features first for LLVM/Clang on OSX. Will you brush it off again as an understandable move by Apple?

I think you would. I certainly wouldn't be happy with Apple for doing it, but I would definitely say it's understandable. Like you're saying, they're a business, they make business decisions.

The point I'm trying to make there is any problems that arise from this fall squarely on the developers choosing to embrace this new language. I'm not writing this comment to convince Apple to act differently. The original post didn't make those arguments to Apple. This is all directed at developers, trying to change THEIR actions and feelings.

So as a developer right now, given that you have a plethora of open tools and an open ecosystem, why would you choose to use a language where a company has the opportunity to manipulate you in the future? Why write libraries and provide support and do this work for free for Apple? Writing libraries for the benefit of the community provides some security in that no one except the community stands to benefit from it. You can go to sleep happy knowing that you're helping out your fellow devs.

Writing for the benefit of a community that is paired with executive power means that it can all be swept from under you. Your library is still helping your fellow dev, but it helps the fellow dev with OSX 10.12 more. Now you've contributed to Apple's bottom line. Was that your intention?

I completely disagree with other commenters in this thread that we have some obligation to be thankful for companies for putting out things with strings attached. I'm not a spoiled brat for not liking everything. These companies would be absolutely nothing without their developers. It's time the community sticks together and realizes the power they have. It's not unthankful to demand more. It's dangerous to get swept up in the excitement of new languages and to assume good graces. Look no further than what Apple has done to Webkit, LLVM, CUPS and more. First class on OSX, give back only what's not newest. Swift will certainly be the same way.

matthewmacleod7• 11 years ago

Imagine Swift becomes a wild success … Will you brush it off again as an understandable move by Apple?

I'm a bit unclear what you seem to think is lost under these circumstances versus copylefted software. Let's say Apple released Swift under the GPL. They would still be free to do all of the things you describe.

This is, as above, no different from the copyleft case.

It's extraordinary difficult to argue that Apple would be in a position to manipulate me as a developer if I started using Swift. For one thing, once the code is open-source – that's it. I can continue developing software using that language. If Apple decide not to release new features, and instead keep them proprietary, then the community is free to fork development.

More importantly, if it's important to members of the free software community, they are entirely able to develop capital-F-free software on top of Apple's release!

I'm really thankful for copyleft licensing and the amazing tools it's given us. But it's a vary complex issue, and I just don't agree that release under a license with fewer restrictions is necessarily a bad thing!

stephenr7• 11 years ago

I completely disagree with other commenters in this thread that we have some obligation to be thankful for companies for putting out things with strings attached.

Swift will be released under a permissive licence, which has literally no strings attached - you can use the software however you like. Unlike the GPL, which has a very explicit string attached.

exelius• 11 years ago

Imagine Swift becomes a wild success; everyone's writing everything in Swift. What will your reaction be when Apple again makes a "legitimate business decision" and leverages the success to the benefit of their company and implicitly disadvantages other platforms? Maybe they double up on Swift support on Mac and start shipping additional features first for LLVM/Clang on OSX. Will you brush it off again as an understandable move by Apple?

This is not the optimal business decision anymore. Platform protectionism of this nature is not helpful today: customers expect their products to work across multiple platforms. Apple open sourced Swift because having more people use Swift is good for Apple's developer ecosystem. Even if they use Swift to create programs for non-Apple platforms, they still know the lingua franca of Apple products and could easily develop for them. Programming languages are a dime a dozen; Swift as a language isn't objectively superior to Java or Ruby or anything.

But ultimately, most people don't write software for fun. They write software to make money, and Apple has a great platform for doing that. Yes, in order to make money on Apple's platform, you have to pay Apple a cut -- and sometimes you have to write libraries to support certain features, and it's up to you and your priorities whether or not you open source those libraries.

"The community" as you describe it has no power. So long as there is money to be made on iOS, there will be a deep line of companies looking to make a buck. And so long as Apple is the gatekeeper to getting your apps in front of iOS users, you have to deal with the fact that they treat iOS and OS X as their preferred development platforms. As long as it makes business sense to develop apps, people will do it.

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

Imagine Swift becomes a wild success; everyone's writing everything in Swift. What will your reaction be when Apple again makes a "legitimate business decision" and leverages the success to the benefit of their company and implicitly disadvantages other platforms? Maybe they double up on Swift support on Mac and start shipping additional features first for LLVM/Clang on OSX.

This seems implausible, given the extremely long lead-time on wide adoption of new language features that is customary. It would also be _easier_ if they went with a GPL-with-retention-of-copyright model; with a non-copyleft license anyone sufficiently motivated could just fork in this hypothetical scenario.

coldtea2• 11 years ago

Imagine Swift becomes a wild success; everyone's writing everything in Swift. What will your reaction be when Apple again makes a "legitimate business decision" and leverages the success to the benefit of their company and implicitly disadvantages other platforms? Maybe they double up on Swift support on Mac and start shipping additional features first for LLVM/Clang on OSX. Will you brush it off again as an understandable move by Apple?

So? It sounds not only an understandable move, but NO ISSUE at all.

In this scenario you describe people have ALREADY benefited tremendously from Swift ("writing everything in it" etc, as you describe).

If they don't like some Apple's moves they can always fork from that point. A language in which "they have written everything", means it has huge adoption, and several third party companies and lots of community members to take this up.

And even if they don't fork, they still have the existing compiler and libraries -- the ones they LIKED so much in you scenario that they have adopted and written everything in them --, and they can continue using them.

Basically your argument is: if Apple gives this as Open Source, they should continue giving us anything they do with it as Open Source.

For me just giving it once as Open Source is enough.

If the main offering is good enough, then I don't care if they add some proprietary extensions, now or in 2020.

And if the main offering is not good, I don't care about it in the first place, whether OSS or not.

hobarrera5• 11 years ago

I agree completely, and, on top of that:

Yeah, Apple definitely doesn't like copyleft. That's okay; lots of people don't[...]

A lot of FLOSS advocates don't either. Like BSD developers, for example.

Personally, I release all my stuff under MIT/ISC licence. Feel free to use it. I don't keep parts secret, etc. I just choose MIT because I feel that users can use the code however they please, and if they share back, it should be because that's what the believe in, no because of legalese.

icebraining9• 11 years ago

GPL doesn't force you to share back either, nor is that its intent.

The purpose of the GPL is to ensure the users of the derived software are granted the same rights the authors of the derived had been granted originally. It's a pay-it-forward mechanism.

lmm2• 11 years ago

The idea that organisations 'owe' the community copyleft software is therefore a bit foreign to me.

It's not about owing something. Apple is not just passively not releasing copyleft software, they're putting a lot of work into releasing non-copylefted alternatives. That's their right of course, and there are certainly good aspects to it.

That's a bit of a weird assumption. Apple's statement was the the Swift code and standard library would be open-sourced. What is the 'best stuff' that we're not going to get?

I can well imagine them having their equivalent of System.Windows.Forms, or of Google Play Services, so that even if the language is notionally open, no iphone apps will run on the open-source version of Swift.

Of course we don't know, because nothing is open-source yet. Which is the biggest point, I think. Good intentions are great, but let's not give apple too much credit until (and unless) we can actually clone and build their repo. We've had broken promises of this sort before (facetime protocol).

plorkyeran2• 11 years ago

Open-sourcing Swift doesn't really have anything to do with being able to run iOS apps outside of iOS. Objective-C has been open-source for a very long time, and this would at most only bring Swift to the level of openness of obj-c. There's countless libraries unrelated to Swift that you'd have to also open-source to be able to run iOS apps as-in on an entirely open source stack.

jahewson4• 11 years ago

Open sourcing System.Windows.Forms wouldn't achieve much anyway because it depends on the Win32 API which is Windows-only. The same is likely true of Cocoa Touch, I imagine it , depends on a lot of iOS functionality.

C# and .NET's openness is a great thing and I think it's unreasoanable to expect to be able to write Windows apps on other platforms which lack the underlying APIs to support them. The same is true of Swift - why all the complaining?

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

Apple is not just passively not releasing copyleft software, they're putting a lot of work into releasing non-copylefted alternatives

Do you mean Swift, or LLVM/clang? I mean, LLVM/clang are, amongst other things, an alternative to GCC, but I think most people would say that having some competition there is a _good thing_. Swift isn't really an alternative to any copyleft thing that I can think of.

I can well imagine them having their equivalent of System.Windows.Forms, or of Google Play Services, so that even if the language is notionally open, no iphone apps will run on the open-source version of Swift.

The intent here isn't that iPhone apps will run on Swift on Linux, say; there are lots of libraries there that aren't part of Swift and aren't otherwise open-sourced.

Lazare• 11 years ago

I'm not sold on the inherent good of copyleft licenses. The author seems to think that funding development of permissively licensed free software is, in fact, a bad thing. I'm sure that seems obviously true to some people.

If Apple is a "wily opponent" of open source, then maybe we need more such opponents?

(Also, I'm not following the argument that Apple is open sourcing Swift to try and beat Android. Nor do I think the Android platform deserves as much of a pass as the author gives it.)

cokernel_hacker3• 11 years ago

I don't believe Mr. Kuhn is especially aware of how LLVM is developed. I am a regular contributor to the project (> 1000+ commits) and it is simply not the case that one can contribute code in this way.

The LLVM project makes it's stance on patents quite clear [1].

[1] http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents

lucozade• 11 years ago

Now you're just letting facts get in the way of a good rant. That's just cheating.

pgeorgi3• 11 years ago

Where does he claim that you can't contribute code to LLVM?

His claim is that Apple ships a LLVM that is different from what you can get as source code (thanks to a lack of copyleft). See the saga of the two aarch64 backends...

cokernel_hacker3• 11 years ago

He writes:

Apple's announcement remained completely silent on patents, and we should expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent grant.

rogerbraun7• 11 years ago

Lots of comments are talking about how Apple "doesn't owe [the FSF] anything" and that it's a "business decisison". This is all true, but it misses the point.

The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non-copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks is bad for free (FSF-style) software. That's why the article argues that you should take a good look at what these companies are actually doing beyond press releases and act accordingly.

You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing. But that's your own decision, based on your own values, which might not be the values the FSF thinks of as important.

cmsj15• 11 years ago

By the same token, it might also be nice to see FSF advocates taking on board the notion that they have brought some of this on themselves with newer versions/variants of the GPL.

pgeorgi3• 11 years ago

While I consider the GPLv3 family to be shoddy licenses in practice (I wasn't aware that it's possible to build a wall of text that makes seasoned lawyers run away, screaming), I understand the rationale.

First, that there were devices shipping GPLv2 code that couldn't be replaced. Remember that the entire FSF story began with a printer driver that couldn't be replaced. Tivo struck a nerve there.

Second, the SaaS phenomenon which, again, works around the spirit of the GPLv2 for which the (already existing) Affero GPL license was integrated properly through some notion of a modular license (GPLv3 + extensions for the "L" or "A" specializations, instead of three completely distinct texts).

moonchrome4• 11 years ago

pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing

No - it's much better than copyleft - the only point he has is the lack of patent grants - which is achievable without copyleft (like Apache license).

Apache gives you the code and the ability to integrate the code in to your product where the copyleft part might not fit.

Open source isn't some ideological dogma for me or these companies - it's a tool to lower the cost of maintenance/support (eg. community is very good at maintaining ports for niche use cases you don't have the resources to support), gain exposure and provide better tools for developers (it's much easier to work with tools that you have source access to).

If you see open source as that then (A)GPL becomes a niche license that's useful for stuff like giving people free access but knowing that copyleft will unacceptable for most commercial applications so they will need to license a custom version (eg. this is the business model of companies like Qt, Xamarin, etc.)

rogerbraun7• 11 years ago

Being a useful tool for businesses is not the main goal of free (FSF-style) software. The freedom of the user to read the source and modify the software is. That's why they care about the distinction between open source and free software.

You can disagree with this, but I think just dismissing it as ideological does not do it justice.

stephenr7• 11 years ago

The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non-copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks is bad for free (FSF-style) software.

Copyleft is meaningless without Copyright. Apple created Swift, and thus owns the Copyright. As the Copyright owner, Apple can licence/release Swift or parts-thereof, as it chooses. Even if they did release Swift under the GPL, nothing would prevent them from also using a non-released version of Swift or from keeping certain parts/libraries in-house.

You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing.

I think its both insulting and an incredibly narrow-view to call permissively licensed software "pseudo freemium".

hobarrera5• 11 years ago

Copyleft is meaningless without Copyright. Apple created Swift, and thus owns the Copyright. As the Copyright owner, Apple can licence/release Swift or parts-thereof, as it chooses. Even if they did release Swift under the GPL, nothing would prevent them from also using a non-released version of Swift or from keeping certain parts/libraries in-house.

If swift is GPL, Apple cannot keep secret changes it makes on top of third party contributions.

If swift is MIT/ISC, Apple can keep changes made on top of third party contributions secret.

rogerbraun7• 11 years ago

I think its both insulting and an incredibly narrow-view to call permissively licensed software "pseudo freemium".

I don't mean the general case of permissively licensed software, but the way that the article expects Apple to act.

anon13856• 11 years ago

You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing.

It's strange that you call permissive licence "pseudo-freemium" when the GPL is just as often in that way. The GPL is generally seen as a preferable licence to use in that situation since it's more difficult for competitors to make use of the code commercially - which means they are more likely to buy the paid licence. x264 is an example of a project like this. It's GPL licensed specifically so that people who want to use or modify it for use in commercial settings buy the expensive commercial licence (the lead dev considers other people using code he wrote to make money without giving him a cut to be "theft").

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non-copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks

What makes you think they'll be doing that? They generally don't with clang/llvm (the only counter-example being that they briefly had a private llvm fork with ARMv8 support, but that was likely just rushing out ARMv8 support when they unexpectedly launched an ARMv8-based phone two years ago).

sounds2• 11 years ago

I have to agree. It used to be Apple who was claiming Unix's traditions. Now they use promises of a future release as PR pieces to combat existing software. (This was a Microsoft strategy several decades ago.)

cmsj15• 11 years ago

That's such a defensive position to take. Who/what is Apple combatting by announcing that Swift will go open source? It's just one more language in a huge sea of options.

It's expected that any language, if it is to be taken seriously outside its host ecosystem, should be available in an Open Source or Free Software form. Why should Swift be any different?

sounds2• 11 years ago

It is different, right now. No source code for Swift.

It's really simple: quit claiming to be open source, or actually ship the code.

Doctor_Fegg• 11 years ago

Not convinced by the editorialised submission title here. Would be preferable to use the blogpost's title, "Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?".

Ensorceled4• 11 years ago

Since the answer to the blog post title is, in the author's opinion, obviously "We shouldn't", that is, in fact, a terrible title.

The submission title is not poorly editorialized, it's pretty much exactly the author's opinion.

bagosm• 11 years ago

"That's already happening with LLVM, anyway; Apple already ships a no-source-available fork of LLVM."

In the old days we used to call this "bait and switch". That being said, I dont necessarily thing it's a bad thing. Corporations don't exist for philanthropy, they are motivated to bring better and viable products to the market.

b00gizm2• 11 years ago

Chris Lattner fought many years (I believe he started working on Swift 5 years ago) to eventually bring Swift to the open source world. It's not a "tactical stunt" to implement Apple's evil plan to lure people away from Android/Linux. Believe it or not, there are people inside Apple who really want feedback and contributions from the community to improve their language.

jarek2• 11 years ago

Believe it or not, there are people inside Apple who really want feedback and contributions from the community to improve their language.

That's not hard to believe. But far more important whether those people are the ones ultimately calling the shots.

josephg• 11 years ago

What an amazingly entitled post. Why would outside contributors call the shots? Its Apple's project; not yours.

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

You can't convince this crowd that Apple is an organization of people, with people inside it, who want to achieve things other than make Apple money. You just can't. I don't know why. Apple is evil in some very special way, apparently.

Osmium• 11 years ago

Reading this thread, I can only imagine some people saying to themselves: and this is why we don't open source our code.

I wonder how many companies keep their source completely closed so as not to have to deal with this kind of PR? Would we not be in a better world if, when a company offers code under a BSD-like license, we just say "thank you very much" and move on? If we don't like the license, we develop our own code under a different one, and that's the way the world is meant to work, surely?

There's a lot about this backlash I genuinely don't understand.

bsaul3• 11 years ago

I completely see your point. But then we've learned from microsoft "embrace, extend and estinguish" tactics that something that may look good at first happens to be, in fact, just a trap to lock you into spending money for something that you didn't used to.

Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple, to have you buy apple products (like developing for iOS today requires you to buy apple products, which i personally don't mind because i love their products, but it shouldn't be mandatory).

I guess it's normal that developers as a community takes great care into what path they're heading toward.

zak_mc_kracken7• 11 years ago

Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple

Isn't that exactly the situation with C# and .net?

C# is kinda open source but the runtime is completely Microsoft's. Nobody seems to make a big deal of it, and C# developers seem pretty happy with their platform overall.

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple, to have you buy apple products

If that happens (which I suspect is unlikely, though I can see it being quite attractive to some people interested in Rust and Scala, say) then it will become dominant on the strength of the released language, not on Apple's unreleased libraries.

sudioStudio64• 11 years ago

I know.

Queue the "embrace, extend and estinguish" comment...

There is an unreasonable fringe that will never be happy.

Ensorceled4• 11 years ago

There is one already :-P

Agree this is unreasonable and makes no sense. "Embrace" is Microsoft releasing IE and "Extend" is adding IE only features and "Extinguish" is killing Netscape. How is Microsoft open sourcing C# or, in this case, Apple open sourcing Swift in any way an "Embrace" of an existing technology or standard in an attempt to destroy it?

We have Apple open sourcing Swift, Google open sourcing Go and MS open sourcing C#. Things have never been safer from the EEE strategy, indeed nobody seems to be even using it anymore.

zxcvcxz• 11 years ago

Vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.

So it's hardly fringe and people are well founded in their beliefs that this is a strategy that's end goal is to make Apple more dominant, not "help open source" or "be friendly to developers".

shiggerino8• 11 years ago

This kind of PR? A lot of backlash? Being anti-copyleft gives you nothing but pats on the back by the tech journalists. Just look at Github.

d_theorist2• 11 years ago

This seems pretty much to reduce to the old copyleft-vs-liberal license debate (along with a generous sprinkling of fear, uncertainty, and doubt), which doesn't seem worth re-hashing.

thomasfoster96• 11 years ago

I don't think I'll ever understand the sense of entitlement people who advocate this idea of 'copyleft license or else' seem to have.

There's nothing bad about Apple not using a copyleft license. I'm glad we live in a world where they can pick any license they want. Apple could have kept Swift closed source if they wanted, and I would have been okay with that - while I might have liked for them to make it open source, it's completely up to them what they want to do with it.

HugoDaniel• 11 years ago

IMO non-copyleft opensource licenses are better for technology push as they lower the barriers for the closedsource industry to embrace and extend the technology.

This might also be the case with Apple and Swift.

BuckRogers• 11 years ago

This is premature. Wait and see on Swift2.0. Seems knee-jerk reaction. I mean, "Apple is not our friend"? No for-profit is our friend. Stating the obvious doesn't reinforce the point made in the editorial that the author fears programmers will be bamboozled by Apple possibly not following through on their promises.

zak_mc_kracken7• 11 years ago

I'm often pointing out in my recent talks how complex and treacherous the Open Source and Free Software political climate became in the last decade.

The climate would be a lot more relaxed if the open source community picked spokespersons who are less fanatical and a bit more level headed than the current crop of leaders (among which rms, esr and the author of this strongly biased article).

PenMount3• 11 years ago

Or just that the "free" software people stopped attacking the open Source people all the time.

the_why_of_y3• 11 years ago

I'd recommend watching Bradley's LCA 2015 talk, especially the slide 11 where he's talking about the aggressive anti-copyleft stance of today's Apache Software Foundation (in contrast to the ASF of a decade ago, as discussed near the beginning of the talk).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ItFjEG3LaA#t=19m50s

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

Honest question:

The author mentions patents. What patents could their possibly be with Swift? There's a TON of information on compiler theory available. Would Apple have wasted time trying to come up with something new just to patent it?

chenster• 11 years ago

BFF.

lorddoig3• 11 years ago

There are a lot of valid criticisms that can be thrown at Apple these days, and maybe they're not "our" friend.

But I find myself thinking more and more that when a company becomes the most valuable private entity in the history of humanity off the back of luxury goods the vast majority of the world can't afford - and in a highly competitive arena too - you really have to assume they know what they're doing when it comes to doing right by themselves. And who can blame them for that?

Apple have won: in business terms, they define success. Standing in judgement of them makes me feel foolish.

Intermernet4• 11 years ago

To paraphrase, and pick a historical group:

"The Romans have won: in empire-building terms, they define success. Standing in judgement of them makes me feel foolish."

Just because they're at the top of the game doesn't make the game itself prone to breaking.

It also doesn't mean that we have to like the game, or believe that it's compatible with standard social moral behavior.

lorddoig3• 11 years ago

I'm not sure it's the same you know. Lands are conquered and retained with politics (i.e. charismatic bullshit) and the application of brute force. It's about suppressing the wills of others whereas winning at commerce in a competitive environment is about understanding and fulfilling them. That, I would argue, is a significantly more challenging task. Many large companies are defined by their size and the advantages it brings, but not so for Apple: lots of companies have the resources to do what they do and yet only Apple ever pulls it off. They really are a different beast.

But I do agree with your other points.

ebbv• 11 years ago

Are we still having these "They chose a license other than the one I support, so it's not really Open Source software." rants in 2015? I thought we were done with those in the late 90s? Come on.

arca_vorago2• 11 years ago

This has been hashed out before in better ways, but I'm going to take a stab at simplifying the issue at hand for modern and future computing.

The developer wants freedom and so does the user. Most of us are both developers and users.

Closed code or non-foss code is geared to give developers freedom, but at the cost of user freedom. FOSS licenses such as GPLv123/LGPL favor user freedom, but at the cost of developer freedom.

For me, the bottom line is that I believe, given the trajectory of computing, FOSS is closer to protecting actual freedom of both developers and users than any alternative.

I think a good thought experiment is to imagine we are a bit further in the future, and now brain-computer interfaces are prevalent. I often joke with my boss that he would be an early adapter of "Apple-brain", but the point is that I would never plug in a brain-computer interface without having the four freedoms on it.

There is a glaring issue at hand here though, with FOSS, that I think fails to address this issue: namely "ou should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way."

I don't think that goes far enough. Due to our legal system, I don't only want the ability to modify my brain-computer, but I also want the ability to make sure no one but me has access to that particular source code. Generally FOSS licenses would protect me from someone copying my brain code if they failed to adhere to the FOSS license, but it does nothing to protect what I would consider proprietary brain-code.

Is your computer as it is not already an extension of your brain to some extent?

Do you have full control of it, or at least the ability to take control of it?

If no is the answer, I consider that a weakness.

Freedom comes with a price, and in this case the primary cost of freedom is a lack of features, and time and effort necessary to get a functional set of features. eg. in reality, I think I really ought to be compiling everything from source (Gentoo, etc) and checking hashes/checksums and reviewing code (maybe in an automatic way).

We all make tradeoffs, but as the future progresses, I believe very strongly that those who embrace pieces of proprietary software now will be at a large disadvantage later, and that includes companies.

Sure, Apple has the freedom to determine their licensing schemes, but do keep in mind that it affects a huge number of users (eg, actual people, instead of a company), and many users will embrace it, but I don't have any issues with FOSS proponents calling out the facts whenever a company with so large a userbase degrades user freedom, because no matter how you want to defend Apple, that's what they do.

shiggerino8• 11 years ago

Proprietary software doesn't give the developers any freedom beyond what they already have by virtue of being the copyright holders to their code.

arca_vorago2• 11 years ago

Even then, you can still do that with FOSS code so what's the need? The Mozilla/Icecat(weasel) saga is a good example.

overgard• 11 years ago

I agree with the title of this, but not much else.

I have nothing against apple or swift, but the way I see it, there's no good reason to only target iOS and ignore android and windows. So Swift has no utility for me at all. Proprietary languages are the worst sort of vendor lock-in, and I have no interest in participating, especially considering that apple has historically not been particularly great to developers.

jezfromfuture• 11 years ago

This reads like a very paranoid post.

sigzero• 11 years ago

No Company is really our "friend".

rsync• 11 years ago

"Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called LLVM."

What does he mean by that ?

Did LLVM already exist in various pieces and apple "discovered" it by putting them together ?

Or is he purposely using the word "discover" to suggest that you can't invent a programming language (since programming is all reducible to math) and that new languages are merely "discovered" ?

mmastrac• 11 years ago

"Discovered" as in "came across serendipitously" is how I'd parse that.

shiggerino8• 11 years ago

They discovered that the University of Illinois had been working on a compiler back-end called LLVM, and that being permissively licensed they could use it as a shortcut to making a proprietary compiler without putting in all the work.

s73v3r4• 11 years ago

By being permissively licensed, it was free from all the garbage and ideological baggage that GCC has, so they could use it in meaningful ways besides being just a compiler. Like using it to do analysis on code in the IDE.

bechampion• 11 years ago

yellow background .. next article.

kps• 11 years ago

  > But, their anti-copyleft witch hunt goes back much further.
  > It began when Richard Stallman himself famously led
  > the world's first GPL enforcement effort against NeXT

Actually it began some five years earlier, when Stallman refused to allow patches for Macintosh support into gcc.

istvan__• 11 years ago

It is an ok article. I checked the license of LLVM though:

http://llvm.org/releases/2.8/LICENSE.TXT

http://llvm.org/docs/FAQ.html#does-the-university-of-illinoi...

If there is something very specific to Apple and they want to keep the copyright after writing that module in LLVM, we should respect their decision. There are several companies using copyright licenses or not open sourcing anything they are working on. Compare to them this entire LLVM situation is a success story from the free software point of view. LLVM became the default toolchain and compiler for many project because of its high quality and meaningful error messages (GCC anyone?). I can live without Swift, but I definitely need LLVM going forward.

happyscrappy• 11 years ago

They should have left the title "Apple is not our friend" because that is easier to upvote without reading.

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

I think it's worth noting that this was originally titled "Apple is not our friend". Sheesh.

rsynnott11• 11 years ago

Apple explicitly stated though that such released software will not be copylefted. (Apple's pathological hatred of copyleft is reasonably well documented.)

Very few new compilers/runtimes are open-sourced; this seems like a bizarre objection, and one that would cover a hell of a lot of other languages.

tzs2• 11 years ago

Apple's dogged pursuit for non-copyleft replacements for copylefted software is far from new. For example, Apple has worked to create replacements for Samba so they need not ship Samba in OSX.

That is not Apple pursuing non-copyleft software. That is Apple pursuing non-GPLv3 software. If Samba had stayed GPLv2, I doubt Apple would have replaced it.

But, their anti-copyleft witch hunt goes back much further. It began when Richard Stallman himself famously led the world's first GPL enforcement effort against NeXT, and Objective-C was liberated.

He makes it sound like it was some kind of highly adversarial situation, but here is how Stallman describes it [1]:

   The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute
   a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them.
   Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me
   at the time that it was, following reasoning like what
   you are using; but since the result was very undesirable
   for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
   
   What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges
   would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would
   be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether
   it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.

   So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not
   allowed by the GPL.

   The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective
   C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C
   parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the
   GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed,
   they made it free.

> But, that whole time, Apple was carefully plotting its escape from the copyleft world.

This is just nonsense. If NeXT/Apple had been so determined to get away from copyleft, they would have changed their Objective-C compiler from being part of GCC to being a completely separate program that took in Objective-C and translated it to plain C.

Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called LLVM. Since then, Apple has sunk millions of dollars into making LLVM better. On the surface, that seems like a win for software freedom, until you look at the bigger picture: their goal is to end copyleft compilers.

Two problems here. First, as mentioned above if Apple was so determined against copyleft compilers, they would have made Objective-C a front end that output C (similar to Stroustrup's cfront for C++).

Second, he is overlooking the fact that GCC was not technically able to meet Apple's needs. For example, Core Image needs an optimizing JIT compiler that can take a chain of image filters and turn it into a single efficient filter for execution on the GPU or CPU (whichever will be faster on the particular system for the particular effects). XCode needs to parse C/C++/Objective-C code in the editor and in the debugger. In short Apple needed a modular compiler system, designed to work as a compiler toolkit from which you can pick and choose the parts needed for a particular application, and designed to be easy to interface with outside tools.

GCC was explicitly designed to not be that, and Stallman would reject changes that would make it easier to use it that way. GCC has opened up a bit to modularization and interfacing with outside tools since then, but that was directly due to competition from LLVM/Clang.

Their goal is to pick and choose when and how programming language software is liberated.

The author's mistake here is in thinking that Apple has a goal in this area. It is far more likely that whether or not programming language software is liberated is completely orthogonal to anything Apple cares about. They are open sourcing Swift because Chris Lattner wanted to, and their lawyers did not see any problem with that.

[1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

lamontcg• 11 years ago

Open Source is not "the cooption of Free Software".

Early versions of the BSD License dates back to at least 1988, the GPLv1 was created in 1989. Do whatever you want, or public domain licensing existing long before either.

If anything GPL and the FSF co-opted Free-as-in-Beer software into their own version of Software-that-is-forever-Free, and now have rewritten history to the point that all BSD code is an attack on Freedom.

And this is largely why GPL/FSF is fighting a losing battle these days. Companies view the GPLv3 as toxic, and most of the kids on GitHub don't care and don't understand why their code isn't just BSD-by-default (and the License Anarchy "movement" is a much bigger problem than this losing battle that FSF is picking with Open Source).

belorn4• 11 years ago

In 1988, open source was a term for spies that collected intelligence from publicly available sources. If you talked about open source then and pointed to BSD, no one would understand you.

If we want to define when liberty was first a concept, it was around roman empire that started to talk about it as a concept. But that is of course not the first time someone was free. Freedom is as old as humanity, and you can't predate that.

so in order, terms was created in: freedom -> liberty -> free software -> open source.

DannyBee• 11 years ago

Just to take the wind out of the sails of the first paragraph:

http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents

LLVM has a developer patent policy, and Apple will adhere to it the same as anyone else or the code won't be part of LLVM. Chris Lattner knows this. LLVM has a foundation with directors that aren't Apple.

So yeah, there goes that argument.

As for the rest - Bradley acts like the free software advocates were much better at open development or not throwing stuff over the wall.

Emacs, for a very long time (and other fsf projects the same), had secret pre-tests. If you shared the ftp info with others and they found out, they'd remove your access.

Part of the EGCS/GCC split was precisely over the fact that GCC was not openly developed.

Their projects still aren't all developed in a very open or free manner.

Of course, Bradley instead concentrates on the higher level view of what this will do to programming language development , partially because Free Software has such a poor history at the lower level on this one, and partially, i believe, because the details just don't matter to him if the concept is achieved :P.

The short version of that is: I'd love to see the free software folks get their own house in great order before continuously calling everyone else out.

It's not that they are wrong in a lot of ways (except about the patent stuff), but the details matter, and they have a very poor history on those details. They stand nearly zero chance of convincing anyone when all that happens is to stand on a soapbox and scream about how bad everyone else is. I know y'all want to just compete on ideology, but it isn't going to work. Prove it's not just a better ideology, but it leads to better communities, or better projects, or anything.

Otherwise, it's just another political faction that nobody is going to care about.

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