Apple is not an open company (by a long stretch) but they do make serious contributions to open software in many areas. Webkit, LLVM and related tools are parti

Apple is not an open company (by a long stretch) but they do make serious contributions to open software in many areas. Webkit, LLVM and related tools are particularly notable. In the case of other software they make fairly perfunctory source dumps. The link between LLVM, Chris Lattner and Swift is especially promising for how Swift will be opened up so I'm optimistic that it will be done seriously and properly. And I have previously predicted that it would be opened up at some point so the announcement this week was not surprising although it was still very good news. I am an iOS developer and I really like Swift. One of the direct benefits of it being opened in this way will be the opportunity to use it on Linux so that it can be easily deployed as server side code. Actually getting to see how it works, potentially tinker (although I don't expect to do much) potentially use it in education contexts where the requirement for a Mac is a blocker are secondary benefits personally although maybe bigger issues for others.