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Initial commit was made 4,5 ago... Is it normal it takes so long for a language to become Open Source?

commit 18844bc65229786b96b89a9fc7739c0fc897905e

Author: Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>

AuthorDate: Sat Jul 17 23:50:59 2010 +0000

Commit: Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>

CommitDate: Sat Jul 17 23:50:59 2010 +0000

    initial swift test


There's no "normal" or not "normal". There are projects that became open source after a decade or more of existance.

Open Office for example had a long life as the proprietary "Star Office". Blender too IIRC.


A number that I've seen thrown around: it takes 5 years to create a language. Probably less nowadays since we have all the tooling. It might make sense to wait until the language has settled-down before open-sourcing.


The "severity" is often not accurate. OpenSSL recently marked an issue as lowly severe, but in fact its severity was high.

Don't trust them. OpenSSL is bad, use LibreSSL instead. OpenSSL == NSA. For sure they know weaknesses and actively exploit them if required.

EDIT: I'm talking about this advisory: https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20150108.txt


I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying LibreSSL isn't bug free either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreSSL#15_October_2015 buffer overflows and memory leaks aren't great.


Didn't say that.

Just take a look at a "security comparison" between LibreSSL and OpenSSL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreSSL#Security_and_vulnerab...

Severity LibreSSL OpenSSL

High 0 5

Medium 15 28

Low 7 10

Total 22 43

LibreSSL has had no "high" vulnerabilities, whereas OpenSSL had 5. Decide for yourself which way to go.

EDIT: Sorry, can't format that table nicely here..


> The "severity" is often not accurate. OpenSSL recently marked an issue as lowly severe, but in fact its severity was high.

...

> LibreSSL has had no "high" vulnerabilities, whereas OpenSSL had 5. Decide for yourself which way to go.

I'm not defending or apologizing for OpenSSL (or any project), but your rationale isn't consistent, seemingly only trying to evoke an emotional response.

Since heartbleed, lots of new SSL implementations have sprung up (Libre, Boring, etc), and hard lights have shone on OpenSSL as well. The scrutiny and competition will come to be win for all consumers of SSL. It's not clear to me (as a consumer) that any project has a huge leg-up over another (though Libre's wholesale dump of a tremendous amount of legacy code sounds like a step in the right direction).

Do we even know this won't show up in other (Boring, Libre) implementations as well ?

Edit: formatting


> I'm not defending or apologizing for OpenSSL (or any project), but your rationale isn't consistent, seemingly only trying to evoke an emotional response.

The GP is pointing out that LibreSSL has avoided the 5 vulnerabilities that OpenSSL marked sev:high since the fork. There isn't any inconsistency about that, it's a pure apples-with-apples comparison.

> It's not clear to me (as a consumer) that any project has a huge leg-up over another

LibreSSL has avoided almost half of the OpenSSL vulnerabilities found since the work. What more do you want?


Format tip: prefix a block of lines with two spaces (on each line) and a newline before and after the block to turn it into a fixed-width font, then format ASCII-style.


Is there an equivalent for iOS which also supports Push Messages?


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