7 reasons Apple should open-source Swift -- and 7 reasons it won't
Apple's new programming language Swift has been public for a few short months, but the Apple faithful are already bowled over. They toss around words like "cleaner," "simpler," "modern," and "powerful."
The rest of the world, however, can only speak about Swift hypothetically -- while the coding tools are free, they run inside only Xcode or a Playground, which, in turn, run on only Apple hardware. Of course, if you're really desperate, a clever website lets you try some basic Swift code as long as you don't touch the libraries.
This is a bit strange. In recent years, creators of programming languages have gone out of their way to get their code running on as many different computers as possible. This has meant open-sourcing their tools and doing everything they could to evangelize their work. Apple has never followed the same path as everyone else. The best course may be to open up Swift to everyone, but that doesn't mean Apple will. Nor should we assume that giving us something for free is in Apple's or (gasp) our best interests. The question of open-sourcing a language like Swift is trickier than it looks.
