[wool_gather]

> Chris Lattner tried to open source [...] LLVM

LLVM was open source from its beginning: it was Lattner's research project. Apple acqui-hired it/him, and they have a private fork.

I agree that it's pretty remarkable that Swift, which was conceived at Apple, was opened up, however.

[pmart123]

I think it make sense from a cost/benefit analysis. Swift was created to make it easier for developers to write iPhone apps. Open sourcing the code provides developers with example code (given it was a brand new language), and more eyeballs to potentially look through the code to improve it whereas google open sourcing search should just allow bing to catch-up.