I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I'm so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you, Apple!
I would have definitely participated in the hate if I had seen that thread, all I can saw now is: bravo Apple! More of this please!
Sometimes companies change their minds this way, like how Microsoft changed its mind on the banning of DVDs for Xbox, even though they never "officially" said they would do that before the announcement of the Xbox One, but it was strongly "rumored" they would do that. I'm sure that's what they intended, but the outrage was too big to let it be.
Sadly, this never came to fruition, supposedly due to legal complications. Since they own Swift, and the underlying compiler infrastructure this may be simpler to pull off.
[0]: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1xuzif/what_ever_happ...
I have a feeling that's what Firefox Hello will eventually become (if it gains traction).
As it stands, I can already post a link in this thread and anyone who visits it from any WebRTC-enabled browser (including mobile devices!) can immediately start a video chat with me[0].
That's not federated (yet), but if it catches on I see no reason why it won't be.
[0] If I weren't in the "quiet room" in my coworking space right now I'd try it as an interesting experiment in the HN community. :)
Signaling is intentionally missing from the WebRTC spec, and that is the "interesting" part here: without open and interoperable signaling, you're just preserving the status quo of proprietary video chat services such as FaceTime, Skype, Hangouts, etc. Just like HTTP enables proprietary services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.
Tim Cook probably wouldn't do something so impulsive based on temperament, and his direct reports would probably not risk it. So I suspect this is a considered announcement.
Still waiting.
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 most people involved in software would realize that the distinction between plan and implementation is extremely important.
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.
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.