Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swift is Open Source

swift.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 458 posts

Re: Swift is Open Source

#152

Post by w4 »

jdub wrote: post #135
acqq wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody knows what effects of the "copyright owned by the contributor" are in the context of Swift's Apache license? I guess the "good side" is that the lawyers of other companies probably like when the code made by their programmers keeps being copyrighted by the company. But it is still an Apache license, so they can't demand too much from the users of the code. Still, are there any negative aspects? Any imaginable…

Not really. Your typical corporate IP lawyer might feel queasy about the collective copyright aspect, but so much of the open source world works this way now... they can suffer in their jocks. One important question they'll ask is: "Who can enforce the copyright and licence?" (Which is when the subtle difference between joint and collective copyright matters.) Non-trivial contributions are made under the terms of the…

> Your typical corporate IP lawyer might feel queasy about the collective copyright aspect, but so much of the open source world works this way now... they can suffer in their jocks.

This is a bad attitude if you want buy-in from large organizations. If you're not worried about that, no problem, but if buy-in is your goal (and I'm sure it's Apple's goal here) you can't just tell potential contributors to "suffer in their jocks."

Re: Swift is Open Source

#154

Post by niccaluim »

KevinMS wrote: post #81

Somebody compare and contrast swift for backend development with golang, node, etc. Google is giving me nothing useful.

I can't comment on Swift as I've not used it but I can say that Go is more than just a language. It's the embodiment of Google's experience running large engineering teams. So many of the decisions in Go--its simplicity, the formatter, the opinionated directory structure, static linking, no special build tools--make life a lot easier for teams. Again, I haven't used Swift, but I don't get the sense that this was one of its design priorities. I've been wrong before though :)

Re: Swift is Open Source

#155

Post by iheart2code »

w4 wrote: post #88
iheart2code wrote: post #68

It's great to see them follow through with this. I remember when Steve Jobs went on stage and said that FaceTime would be an open standard. Haven't seen that happen yet.

> I remember when Steve Jobs went on stage and said that FaceTime would be an open standard. Haven't seen that happen yet. FaceTime has been the subject of multiple patent lawsuits, which is what has prevented it from being opened. See: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 and http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2014/09/...

Ah, that would explain it. Thanks!

Re: Swift is Open Source

#158

Post by bamazizi »

The programming language eco system is really improving rapidly and efficiently. It seemed the developer's toolkit was limited by the languages created 20+ years ago but within the last few years we're seeing a renaissance in developer toolkits as well as development philosophies.

Languages like Go, Rust, and now Swift are not only great from almost every aspect over the last generation languages like C, C++, Java, but a lot noobs or scripting language developers are also converting to more low level languages. So the barrier to pick up a lower level language and become productive in it has really diminished.

Go has had a head start and introduced minimal simplicity. It's a great/powerful language and almost everybody can pick it up quickly within a few days. I wouldn't listen to people who dismiss the language for its lack of "features" and have never written more than "hello world" in it.

Swift is "important" because of Apple & iOS. It has a much steeper learning curve than Go and naturally it takes a few weeks of dedication to get comfortable with it. However, once you overcome the introductory challenge then you'll start to appreciate the language and its capabilities.

Already the job market for both languages are really high with higher than average salaries. So learning/mastering both Go and Swift is the best decision you can make.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#159

Post by jdub »

w4 wrote: post #152
jdub wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Your typical corporate IP lawyer might feel queasy about the collective copyright aspect, but so much of the open source world works this way now... they can suffer in their jocks. One important question they'll ask is: "Who can enforce the copyright and licence?" (Which is when the subtle difference between joint and collective copyright matters.) Non-trivial contributions are made under the terms of the…

> Your typical corporate IP lawyer might feel queasy about the collective copyright aspect, but so much of the open source world works this way now... they can suffer in their jocks. This is a bad attitude if you want buy-in from large organizations. If you're not worried about that, no problem, but if buy-in is your goal (and I'm sure it's Apple's goal here) you can't just tell potential contributors to "suffer in t…

Sure, it's flippant, but do recall that the entire concept of open source absolutely terrified IP lawyers not that long ago (and in some cases, still does).

Lawyers who are too conservative to allow their company's developers to contribute to open source projects (that they don't own) have a problem. Open source is way beyond pussy-footing around just to make corporate lawyers feel comfortable.

And seriously, if Apple can do it, why can't they?

Re: Swift is Open Source

#160

Post by crudbug »

What was the design decision that required function declaration to be :

func hello(name: String) -> String { }

rather than,

func hello(name: String) : String { }

Post reply on HN