I think the "pulling it off" here is coercing their megacorp organization into tolerating the idea of open-sourcing something they poured so much time and money into developing. This is also why people have been celebrating Microsoft open sourcing things recently.
"By the end of the year" perhaps suggests that Microsoft got out in front and Apple's hand has been forced into changing their roadmap. I suspect that Apple will struggle with to support cross platform development beyond tossing Swift over the transom. Supporting diverse execution environments is not their core competence historically.
It also suggests that swift version 2.0 isn't out yet and they don't want to deal with open sourcing it until then or have to go through lawyers regardless.
If you followed Chris Lattner on the dev forums he always gave the impression that they wanted it open source from the start but had bigger fish to fry. They reimplemented a ton of the compiler multiple times after finding bugs in the existing language specs. Don't read too far into this that microsoft forced anything. For one, we'll never know and this is at best conjecture.
As for supporting diverse execution environments, I'd argue llvm/clang/webkit proves otherwise. Granted they're not "supporting" it in the sense that they're selling support for it but I'm not sure exactly who would meet your criteria right now.
I think this is where companies like Xamarin and JetBrains can pick up the slack as they have with the Microsoft stack. As long as it's (legitimately) opened-sourced, of course.
Which is not a very interesting thing to gripe over.. there's nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, why don't we stop with the pedantry?
There is nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, but that 1) that isn't what the headline indicated (it's since been changed, but at the time it was something very close to "Apple has open-sourced Swift!"), and 2) the comment I was replying to said Apple had "done it," which seemed to be responding to the inaccurate headline.
I think most people involved in software would realize that the distinction between plan and implementation is extremely important.
Surely any reasonable person would recognize that it looks like swift will be open sourced, barring something unexpected.. You're nitpicking at someones choice of words and not adding anything valuable to the conversation.
I sincerely do not think "They pulled it off" versus "It looks like they will do this sometime in the next six months" is nitpicking somebody's choice of words. The difference between the two is not a minor nuance, it's a large practical difference, and I don't think people would necessarily understand the latter meaning from the former.
When I first saw this thread, I certainly thought Apple had actually open-sourced Swift, as both the headline and the comment I was replying to said so. Then I looked at the linked page and saw it had not happened, so I corrected this materially important piece of information.
The headline and the direct quote from apples website say "Swift will be open source later this year".. I don't think anyone in this thread is trying to say anything to the contrary. Certainly the decision to open source swift has been "pulled off", perhaps that's what LesZedCB was referring to.. who knows? Who bloody cares? It's very much not important.
As I already said, that was not the title when I posted my comment. At the time it was something very much like "Swift is now open-source!" Because of worthless nit-picks like mine, the title was later changed to be accurate.
Honestly if you're that nervous and scared of what might happen in the future there's probably nothing Apple (and most other companies) can possibly do to comfort you. Probably better for you to avoid the potential pain and skip this one.
