Google forked Swift
github.com
github.com
(I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)
Don't see a problem.
This posting let you know their intention. Isn't it newsworthy?
- I was worried about Google's intention, but I didn't claim one.
- I chose the word "fork" because it was what actually happen. I tried to be dry as much as possible to deliver just a fact. Making people confused was not my intention. Anyway, I'm sorry for that confusion.
- I didn't think the word "fork" is abusive or bad wording at the point of posting. I simply forgot the other meaning of "fork" at the point of posting. Now I remembered how it's different.
- Now I agree that the word "fork" could make you (and many other people) confused. I'm sorry.
- If the wording "fork" made you confused, I think you also need to blame Github for why they didn't use the word "clone" on their website.
- I blame Github because this is major reason of why I forgot the other meaning of "fork" nowadays.
- You are telling me to find out before posting this to here, but how? At the point of posting, there was literally no one was discussing on this. No one around me could explain Google's intention. I googled, and there was no result. If you know a good place to ask, please let me know. I'd love it.
- Google engineers came and explained their intention. IMO, this posting ended up in the best way it could.
But good that they explained. Forking is a common strategy on Github, if one has no write access, to submit a pull request.
In general, corps only fork a repo when they want end users to use their repo.
In the case of development by corp's developers, they just generally fork it themselves and submit PRs from their accounts.
so I can see the confusion.
Not other way around. You create fork and try to push and if they does not agree with you. You will say ok we are having our own fork.
Facebook people also contribute to Swift but Facebook has no fork in their repository instead the person who contributes have in their own repo.
I have read somewhere steve jobs was very unhappy with this event and that is the reason they make their technologies close.
Swift is hard work of lot of people and Swift community, I really love the openness it brings in Apple. These types of incidents make them to rethink their decision and let developers like us to not involve in their choices.
Chris Lattner has done wonderful job to make community like this and if google misuse and made their own language out of hard work of swift community I do not think it is good for any of us.
I read google have not forked so I take my comment back as I cannot delete it.
Thanks HN
(You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)
> I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer.
Seems like the simplest explanation to me.
(there really is nothing down this rabbit hole, FWIW)
If we were trying to keep something major under wraps, this would be an exceptionally bad way of achieving that.
The public docs we have even show that we discourage private github repos for various reasons. Our general internal answer would be "don't stage it on github at all unless you are willing to see it leak"
So basically either legal problems or go generics. It's a fun life.
("Forks" with no code changes ending up at the top of HN, as if they signaled a major shift in corpprate strategy, are an excellent example of why I think this is a bad policy. For all we know some Google employee PR'd a typo fix they noticed one weekend and has since deleted the branch.)
They are now a bit out of date, a few things have been simplified/relaxed (generally, the goal is as little process as possible).
Then again, people also like to super-duper parse the words in the docs, which are not really written to be parsed that way.
Meh, looks more like a mirror.
May even have been accidental. Do you know how they decide what lands under Github's google/ umbrella?
Which, per rumor was considered last year:
"About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android"
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw...
Hint: its none of the ones you use.
However, the interests of vendors are diametrically opposed to our interests as developers -- it is all about vendor lockin, and making it as hard as possible for us to support competing platforms.
Much easier for developers to go check out your platform.
More unification would likely also mean better abstraction layers across platforms, meaning that competing platforms could rely on those abstraction layers.
Think about how nice it is that most devices out there are running at least a flavor of Unix. You have a base-level expectation of how things can be integrated. There are of course differences, but generally if you write your stuff in a certain way you can use it almost everywhere!
And for those who don't want to work on Unix, all you need is a compatability layer to bring over some useful tools. Just get that C compiler up and running and you get a lot of stuff too!
The reason this is different from other forms of platform lock-in is that ultimately things like programming languages don't cover the full stack, so there are "obvious" places where you can swap either your language, the stuff underneath, or the stuff above it.
Nothing more. They aren't related to or even located organizationally anywhere near Android.
Swift at Google has enough folks working on it that we need a staging ground/integration point, and we decided it should be public.
No offense, just a question. Because I'm not a native English speaker.
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw...
"Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android"
"About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android"
Sorry for this language but I do not want it to be at google home.
You guys do not respect others.