News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why I want Swift to be your first language by oddevan on Thursday August 27, 2015 @03:24PM (#10131490)
That's a fair point. IIRC, FaceTime actually ran into patent trouble that kept it from being a P2P protocol, so they couldn't really open it up.
Re:Why I want Swift to be your first language by mikeash on Thursday August 27, 2015 @03:35PM (#10131549)
I have also heard that the first time the FaceTime engineers found out the protocol was going to be open sourced was when Steve announced it live on stage to the world.

I'm not happy with what happened to FaceTime but I don't think Swift is in the same boat. It seems to have the backing of all the relevant parties and shouldn't face any hurdles like the patent stuff that sank FaceTime. And they gave a hard deadline for themselves to stick to. I'm pretty optimistic about it happening.