"The Swift Programming Language" book license feedback FB9892954

While Swift itself is open source (thanks Apple!), "The Swift Programming Language" book is not. Version 5.6 beta is copyright 2022 by Apple and all rights are reserved (full license below).

This makes it problematic to use substantial excerpts (beyond fair use) for even non-commercial educational content.

By contrast, Apple Education's "Swift Fundamentals" and "Swift Data Collections" books include slide content for educators which is licensed by Apple Inc. under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

I've opened FB9892954 with Apple to suggest a more lenient license. I personally think the non-commercial attribution share-alike license would be perfect.

I'm posting here in the hopes that people with authority over documentation at Apple may notice and license The Swift Book more leniently going forward. Ideally before 5.6 gets fully released in (presumably) June 2022.

Thank you.

Darrell Root

Full current license from the last page of "The Swift Programming Language (5.6 beta)":

“Apple Inc.
Copyright © 2022 Apple Inc.
All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Apple Inc., with the following exceptions: Any person is hereby authorized to store documentation on a single computer or device for personal use only and to print copies of documentation for personal use provided that the documentation contains Apple’s copyright notice.

No licenses, express or implied, are granted with respect to any of the technology described in this document. Apple retains all intellectual property rights associated with the technology described in this document. This document is intended to assist application developers to develop applications only for Apple-branded products.”

While the iBooks version of The Swift Programming Language is copyrighted, the swift.org version of the book (which is virtually identical) uses the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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If that's true that would be wonderful! But when I go to https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ the bottom of every page says "Copyright © 2022 Apple Inc. All rights reserved." Do you have a link?

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Check the Copyrights and Notices section on the last page of the ePub here: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/TheSwiftProgrammingLanguageSwift56.epub

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Excellent! A much better license! I've updated and closed my FB. This will make my Swift education-related project much easier!

Thank you Kyle and 1-877...!

“Copyright and Notices

Apple Inc.
Copyright © 2022 Apple Inc.

This document is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License: Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0

No licenses, express or implied, are granted with respect to any of the technology described in this document. Apple retains all intellectual property rights associated with the technology described in this document.”

Excerpt From
The Swift Programming Language (Swift 5.6)
Apple Inc.
This material may be protected by copyright.

1 Like