What it means from a legal standpoint is that Apple is bound by the same terms as everybody else.<p>The way it works is this: Apple is making Swift available to you (and others) under Apache 2.0.  You send in some changes, which you make available to Apple (and others) under Apache 2.0.  Everyone is on equal footing, and Apple can&#x27;t relicense it to someone else on terms of their choosing that involve, for example, neutering the patent grant&#x27;s self-destruct clause.<p>This was the default way that open source worked for years, before people started cargo-culting the (totally unnecessary) CLA process into their projects.<p>What it means from a practical standpoint, though, is that the project is easier to contribute to, what with the impedance imposed by a CLA process being, you know, non-existent.