[jcurbo]

You only have to be a paid developer to get the beta of XCode; once it comes out of beta, it'll be available on the Mac App Store for free.

That said, it'd be nice to see Swift get open sourced at some point.

[pdpi]

I'm afraid that it's going to be tied too tightly to the Cocoa Runtime to make opening the language up feasible without also opening Cocoa up.

[chrisdevereux]

You're thinking of the Objective-C runtime, which in fact is opensource: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-551.1

[tcard]

I don't think so. It seems to me that they did a good job on the interface between Objective-C and Swift, so one could perfectly live without the other. Objective-C constructs are exposed as native Swift constructs.

[manojlds]

C# is "open source", but the CLR is not.

[rjsw]

If they open sourced the compiler then maybe you could link against GNUstep on other platforms.

[koko775]

That's their hope - after 1.0, they want to open-source it.