Oh, it's in those two footnotes: Apple pre-announced that they were going to open source Swift, and then they did, and they did a great job and there was much rejoicing.
But there was some skepticism, because Steve Jobs had previously announced they were going to open-source their FaceTime technology so non-Apple platforms could adopt it and it could become a cross-platform communications system... but they never did.
Both announcements got people excited, though.
EDIT: Okay, my bad; I stand corrected. I remembered him saying that in 2012, but I googled it after lowtolerance disputed my claim, and what he actually said was, "We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.”
Apple never said anything about open-sourcing FaceTime. Jobs said they were going to make it an open standard. That’s very different, but it doesn’t matter because they didn’t do that, either. My understanding is that patents got in the way of the plan, but according to engineers at Apple, there was never any actual “plan” to do this. Jobs’ introduction of FaceTime was the first they’d heard about making FaceTime an open standard, too.
Apple open-sourcing Swift doesn't really do much though. Sure, Swift is a nice language but allowing IBM or others to start using Swift for making mainframe or web frameworks doesn't make a difference to Apple from a sales perspective. Now if they either open-sourced iOS or started a program by which OEMs could sell devices with iOS then that would be huge -- but that's not going to happen because Apple has been rather up-front that they are a consumer electronics company now so anything that diminishes their ability to sell hardware is counter to their prime directive. Google, on the other hand, makes money by having more information to index, analyze, and develop marketing profiles. They would be just fine with Microsoft putting Android on a Surface Phone as long as hooks to Google Cloud products remained... otherwise they wouldn't be able to call it Android (eg: why Amazon's Fire devices don't officially run Android even though 99% of the APIs are the same).
But there was some skepticism, because Steve Jobs had previously announced they were going to open-source their FaceTime technology so non-Apple platforms could adopt it and it could become a cross-platform communications system... but they never did.
Both announcements got people excited, though.
EDIT: Okay, my bad; I stand corrected. I remembered him saying that in 2012, but I googled it after lowtolerance disputed my claim, and what he actually said was, "We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.”