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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

Reading this thread, I can only imagine some people saying to themselves: and this is why we don't open source our code.

I wonder how many companies keep their source completely closed so as not to have to deal with this kind of PR? Would we not be in a better world if, when a company offers code under a BSD-like license, we just say "thank you very much" and move on? If we don't like the license, we develop our own code under a different one, and that's the way the world is meant to work, surely?

There's a lot about this backlash I genuinely don't understand.

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I completely see your point. But then we've learned from microsoft "embrace, extend and estinguish" tactics that something that may look good at first happens to be, in fact, just a trap to lock you into spending money for something that you didn't used to.

Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple, to have you buy apple products (like developing for iOS today requires you to buy apple products, which i personally don't mind because i love their products, but it shouldn't be mandatory).

I guess it's normal that developers as a community takes great care into what path they're heading toward.

> Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple, to have you buy apple products

If that happens (which I suspect is unlikely, though I can see it being quite attractive to some people interested in Rust and Scala, say) then it will become dominant on the strength of the released language, not on Apple's unreleased libraries.

> Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple

Isn't that exactly the situation with C# and .net?

C# is kinda open source but the runtime is completely Microsoft's. Nobody seems to make a big deal of it, and C# developers seem pretty happy with their platform overall.

I wouldn't call C# a super dominant language. it is extremely popular in the corporate world, where paying for something is seen as a good thing, because it means you've got support from a vendor.

In the start up culture, where technological innovation and taking risks are core values, people tend to favor maximum freedom and maximum technological possibilities, which are often in contradiction with what a corporation would like you to do.

Now that corporations want to have the same level of innovation you usually find in start ups, they start to want to use the same tools and embrace a bit of its culture. Note that Microsoft saw that and have announced massive open sourcing of every part of the .Net ecosystem just this year (which made a big impression here on HN, judging by the comments).

And now we've got Apple and swift, and people start to wonder if it's going to be "Ballmer" open sourcing, "Nadella" open sourcing, or "Stallman" open sourcing.

It's not just a matter of ideology. It will have practical consequences on the possibilities of using the language on every server configuration, of building innovative software with it, things even people at Apple wouldn't anticipate. Or if you're going to remain constrained to where Apple wants to allow this technology to grow.

Not just corporate, don't forget that Mono exists. And things like Unity include it, which means a lot of games are written in C#.

It exists but it's also tiny and poorly-supported compared to the Microsoft implementation.

No, it's not any more.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-i...

That's no longer the case; the runtime is now open source too.

- C# did not become super dominant. - The runtime was only recently open sources, and MS keeps on releasing more bits. Their goal is to clearly port the entire runtime to OS X and Linux.

I know.

Queue the "embrace, extend and estinguish" comment...

There is an unreasonable fringe that will never be happy.

There is one already :-P

Agree this is unreasonable and makes no sense. "Embrace" is Microsoft releasing IE and "Extend" is adding IE only features and "Extinguish" is killing Netscape. How is Microsoft open sourcing C# or, in this case, Apple open sourcing Swift in any way an "Embrace" of an existing technology or standard in an attempt to destroy it?

We have Apple open sourcing Swift, Google open sourcing Go and MS open sourcing C#. Things have never been safer from the EEE strategy, indeed nobody seems to be even using it anymore.

Since you're talking about my comment, i just want to make a point : i'm absolutely thrilled by Apple's announcement. I just hope they're going to go all the way in.

I also understand why people that have been disappointed by previous MS tricks start to raise caution signs. That's the only reason i quoted the embrace stuff. To remind people that sometimes tech companies have hidden motives to offer free candies. Not because they'll be reproducing the exact same strategies.

I'm extending your comment :-)

Oh, I fully don't trust MS, Apple or Google at all. It's just that right now, only Google is in a good position to screw us (and one could say they are) and it's not because of their EEE strategy.

Vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.

So it's hardly fringe and people are well founded in their beliefs that this is a strategy that's end goal is to make Apple more dominant, not "help open source" or "be friendly to developers".

This kind of PR? A lot of backlash? Being anti-copyleft gives you nothing but pats on the back by the tech journalists. Just look at Github.

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