Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi just announced that the company is open-sourcing Swift, the programming language it debuted at its Worldwide Developer Conference last year.
In addition to providing the code to Swift compilers and libraries for iOS and OS X, Federighi said Apple will go the extra step of providing that same source code built for Linux, too. That could lead to developers writing backend code in Apple’s language, which derived some of its syntax from languages typically used for server-side programming.
Federighi said Swift will go open source in late 2015. Hopefully they’ll hold to that timing — Steve Jobs famously said the FaceTime protocol would go open source so it could be integrated with third-party apps, a promise Apple has yet to be deliver on.