These are a few notes on Apple’s Swift open source development project, taken from this mailing list post by Apple’s Chris Lattner:
- Open source is pretty great. It has been incredible to see such a vibrant community working so well together, and to see you come together practically overnight.
- Open source also brings challenges. I think it is fair to say that “open design” is slower and less predictable than “closed design”. However, the end result is significantly better, and therefore the tradeoff is worth it.
- Software scheduling (particularly with open source) continues to be difficult-to-impossible to predict.
- It is *good* to have high goals, but we need to do a better job of communicating that “goals” are not “promises” so that people don’t feel misled.
