Last year Apple introduced their Swift programming language, which for developers was actually a nice surprise. What was an even bigger surprise was that earlier this year during WWDC 2015, Apple’s SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi promised that Swift will eventually be made open source.The good news for developers is that the time has come as Swift is now officially open source. According to Federighi earlier this year, “We think Swift is the next big programming language, the one that we’ll all be doing application and system programming on for 20 years to come. We think Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone.”
The Swift programming language has been released under the Apache 2.0 license which means that developers will be able to use the language as they like. They will even be able to build commercial products with it and at the moment, it supports iOS, OS X, and Linux. Swift has also been built to play nicely with Objective-C, so developers should be able to blend existing code with it.
As for how this affects consumers, basically with the programming language being open source, it makes it more accessible to developers. Developers will also be able to come up with various tools and apps which in turn will give you guys more options to choose from. What exactly will be the result of this remains to be seen, but for those interested you can head on over to Swift.org for the details.