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Apple has stated that they're going to open source Swift in the future, who cares if they choose to host it on their own platform.


I'll believe it when I see it; I'm still waiting for the promised open-source release of the Facetime protocol.


That was canceled due to a patent lawsuit. It would have cost apple a ton of money to pay a patent troll to be able to open source FaceTime.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20236114


To clarify. Because of this lawsuit, Apple moved facetime away from being peer-to-peer to now being routed through Apple's servers. Since they have to use the centralized model, opening up the protocol for others to use would also require using Apple's servers to play nicely. So Apple would be footing the bill.


Thanks; it's just a present irritant because the Hangouts client for iPad is presently broken (no video), and Skype doesn't support video conference calls in their tablet clients, so I don't have a free cross-platform multi-way tablet-based video-chat protocol that works, and another entry in that space would be convenient.


I haven't heard that they have announced a decision. Do you have a source for that?


Let me second this question. I have heard the equivalent of, "It's too early to be talking yet about whether we will or won't open source Swift; let's talk about that later," but I didn't interpret that to mean, "We're going to open source Swift later."

Of course, maybe I missed the memo.


When I asked Chris Lattner a week and a half account at the LLVM dev summit, there was still no decision yet, ...




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