Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?
Just to take the wind out of the sails of the first paragraph:<p><a href="http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents" rel="nofollow">http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents</a><p>LLVM has a developer patent policy, and Apple will adhere to it the same as anyone else or the code won't be part of LLVM.  Chris Lattner knows this.  LLVM has a foundation with directors that aren't Apple.<p>So yeah, there goes that argument.<p>As for the rest - Bradley acts like the free software advocates were much better at open development or not throwing stuff over the wall.<p>Emacs, for a very long time (and other fsf projects the same), had secret pre-tests.
If you shared the ftp info with others and they found out, they'd remove your access.<p>Part of the EGCS/GCC split was precisely over the fact that GCC was not openly developed.<p>Their projects still aren't all developed in a very open or free manner.<p>Of course, Bradley instead concentrates on the higher level view of what this will do to programming language development , partially because Free Software has such a poor history at the lower level on this one, and partially, i believe, because the details just don't matter to him if the concept is achieved :P.<p>The short version of that is: I'd love to see the free software folks get their own house in great order before continuously calling everyone else out.<p>It's not that they are wrong in a lot of ways (except about the patent stuff), but the <i>details matter</i>, and they have a <i>very poor history</i> on those details.  They stand nearly zero chance of convincing anyone when all that happens is to stand on a soapbox and scream about how bad everyone else is.  
I know y'all want to just compete on ideology, but it isn't going to work.
Prove it's not just a better ideology, but it leads to better communities, or better projects, or anything.<p>Otherwise, it's just another political faction that nobody is going to care about.