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by wenc 2773 days ago
> Chris Lattner tried to open source for the sake of OSS, with LLVM and Swift, but he left.

Maybe there's some history here that I'm missing: but it looks like LLVM and Swift are open source. Did Chris have any trouble open-sourcing them? Was the reason for his departure related to that?
1 comments
sudhirj 2773 days ago
He succeeded at open sourcing those two projects. Not sure why he left, but other than WebKit, which was probably a defense against Microsoft and IE, don’t think anything else can come out of Apple.
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bluGill 2773 days ago
WebKit started as a fork from khtml (from kde). Apple didn't have a choice about open sourcing Webkit because they started with GPL2 code. They would have kept it closed source if they could, but that would have taken a few years of development, while they could start with khtml and get a great browser in just a few months.

I expect in a few years (5-10) Apple will do an audit, discover that only a small amount of code isn't written by Apple, and replace that with inhouse code and then relicense to something propitiatory. Time will tell.

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wenc 2770 days ago
Well I guess there's Foundationdb [1] and cups [2] but those were acquisitions.

[1] https://github.com/apple/foundationdb [2] https://github.com/apple/cups

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