For the nth time, this wold put on hold after a patent dispute.

His comment is older than any of the comments mentioning the lawsuit.

It's still uninformed crap that implies Apple reneged on a promise, when in reality they were forcibly stopped.

The fact still remains that Apple made a big promise without analyzing all the legal aspects of it. Most average to big size companies do the reverse of it - Make sure the legalities are in their favor before making big announcements.

Are mistakes not possible in your world? Somehow I doubt even an exhaustive legal analysis would have turned up a patent troll. (Kind of characteristic of patent trolls, really)

It's hard to know what really happened, but the story is that it was basically Steve Jobs who made that big promise himself. It is said (and again, who knows if this is true, but that's the story) that the first time the FaceTime engineers heard about making it an open standard was when Steve announced it to the world.

Open sourcing Swift, on the other hand, is clearly something they've been planning for a while with the full knowledge of all involved and wasn't just a sudden impulsive sort of thing.

it's only June.

By "later this year" he means the year that FaceTime was first introduced (2010).