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Cool! But, is it possible that this violates Apple's TOS or any legal limitation on use of the Swift language? I remember there being a lot of heated discussion

Cool! But, is it possible that this violates Apple's TOS or any legal limitation on use of the Swift language? I remember there being a lot of heated discussion about making Swift officially open source back when it was announced, but I don't recall ever hearing anyone suggest a community project to make an OSS compiler for it. This is most interesting, but I'd love to know that Apple would be okay with this, or would have no recourse to shut it down, prior to putting in the time to pick it up.

djur 12y ago
Programming languages cannot be copyrighted. It doesn't look like they've reimplemented any Apple APIs, so there wouldn't appear to be any room for an Oracle-style lawsuit claiming that standard library code was copied. I don't know what the trademark situation might be, though.
- mehrdada 12y ago
  > Programming languages cannot be copyrighted Are you sure? I'm genuinely curious to see a reference/precedent. Also, does that restrict patentability of programming language features? (I personally can see PLs not being copyrightable, but being patentable.)
  - infraruby 12y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....
  - djur 12y ago
    For Europe, there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Programming_Ltd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Progr.... There's not really any case law I'm aware of in the US, mostly because nobody's ever tried. Copyright doesn't cover "facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation". You can trademark the name of a language, and its documentation and any distributed software are under copyright, but the process required to translate that language into machine code isn't eligible for copyright. Parts of the implementation might be patentable, but I don't know of any cases of anyone successfully patenting a programming language. The Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is still going back and forth in the courts. It's worth noting that even Oracle isn't claiming that the parts of Android that involve parsing and compiling Java code are infringing on their copyright. The matter of controversy is that they claim copyright on the design of the Java standard library. Swift's standard library is pretty much Cocoa, which isn't being rewritten here.
ttflee 12y ago
The problem is not whether it is legal to use Swift in a 3rd party environment, but the lack of support in the 3rd party eco-system per se means the attempt would vanish, in time. I believe most of us who actually use Objective-C choose it not because the language itself is designed to be simple and elegant, (and yes the language is simple and elegant,) but because the Cocoa and Cocoa-Touch are well supported by Apple. No offence to the effort outside of APPL, but it is not enough to support a full-fledged eco-system with all 3rd-party F/OSS written in Objective-C that is compatible with what Apple currently uses in order to build reusable components. GNUStep has existed for so many years, and Étoilé for years as well, but I did not see emergence of adoption in community comparable to that of other popular F/OSS frameworks, e.g. Mono and Qt. And I do not see how this issue could be circumvented, unless some big player shows up and adopt any of these projects, like what Google did to Android.

djur 12y ago

Programming languages cannot be copyrighted. It doesn't look like they've reimplemented any Apple APIs, so there wouldn't appear to be any room for an Oracle-style lawsuit claiming that standard library code was copied. I don't know what the trademark situation might be, though.

mehrdada 12y ago
> Programming languages cannot be copyrighted Are you sure? I'm genuinely curious to see a reference/precedent. Also, does that restrict patentability of programming language features? (I personally can see PLs not being copyrightable, but being patentable.)
- infraruby 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....
- djur 12y ago
  For Europe, there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Programming_Ltd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc_v_World_Progr.... There's not really any case law I'm aware of in the US, mostly because nobody's ever tried. Copyright doesn't cover "facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation". You can trademark the name of a language, and its documentation and any distributed software are under copyright, but the process required to translate that language into machine code isn't eligible for copyright. Parts of the implementation might be patentable, but I don't know of any cases of anyone successfully patenting a programming language. The Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is still going back and forth in the courts. It's worth noting that even Oracle isn't claiming that the parts of Android that involve parsing and compiling Java code are infringing on their copyright. The matter of controversy is that they claim copyright on the design of the Java standard library. Swift's standard library is pretty much Cocoa, which isn't being rewritten here.

ttflee 12y ago

The problem is not whether it is legal to use Swift in a 3rd party environment, but the lack of support in the 3rd party eco-system per se means the attempt would vanish, in time. I believe most of us who actually use Objective-C choose it not because the language itself is designed to be simple and elegant, (and yes the language is simple and elegant,) but because the Cocoa and Cocoa-Touch are well supported by Apple. No offence to the effort outside of APPL, but it is not enough to support a full-fledged eco-system with all 3rd-party F/OSS written in Objective-C that is compatible with what Apple currently uses in order to build reusable components. GNUStep has existed for so many years, and Étoilé for years as well, but I did not see emergence of adoption in community comparable to that of other popular F/OSS frameworks, e.g. Mono and Qt. And I do not see how this issue could be circumvented, unless some big player shows up and adopt any of these projects, like what Google did to Android.