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.
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?
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).