Apple's Swift Dark Future

[kyonides]

What's Swift?

Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux and z/OS. Swift is designed to work with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products.

You might need to read the following articles first to get a grasp on what I am talking here:

https://forums.swift.org/t/apple-is-inde...ures/19779
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/26...t_patents/

Usually when you create or maintain or develop a programming language, you want it to be adopted by as many users as possible. OK, Microsoft's story concerning C# early policies do not seem to prove this point, but it was learned by many people even so. In MS case they preferred to allow people to use it for free... (If somebody else is more knowledgeable than me, feel free to clarify C# current state.) Apple do not want to follow the same path and started patenting some components of Swift out of the blue. They do not want people to flee away, instead they should understand they are trying to "protect them"... I do not know what exactly are they protecting developers from. Once some piece of code is patented, you are at risk of being sued or getting some sort of DMCA to stop publishing or modifying any version of it without written consent from Apple or any other company or corporation, and you know how corporations love to be understanding.  

I do not pretend to start a serious discussion on this topic, it should suffice to say people should know about this now that they might have a chance to see if they need to find an opensource and free as in speech alternative to Swift or its compiler if they want to keep developing bundled apps for any of Apple's operating systems.