Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper

"Membership in an open source community is like membership in the community of science. There is a straightforward process for finding a true answer to any question. People disagree in public conversations. They must explain clearly and listen to those who response with equal clarity. Members of the community pay more attention to those who have been right in the past, and to those who enhance their reputation for integrity by admitting in public when they are wrong. They shun those who mislead. There is no court of final appeal. The only recourse is to the facts.

It’s a messy process but it works, the only one in all of human history that ever has. No other has ever achieved consensus at scale without recourse to coercion.

In science, anyone can experiment. In open source, anyone can access the facts of the code. Linus Torvalds may supervise a hierarchy that decides what goes into the Linux kernel, but anyone can see what’s there. Because the communities of science and open source accept facts as the ultimate source of truth and use the same public system for resolving disagreements about the facts, they foster the same norms of trust grounded in individual integrity."

The entire blog post is worth a read.

[1]: http://mathics.org

[2]: http://mathics.net

The tie-breaker is financial. Jupyter is winning because it's free, not because it's social. It becomes social because of widespread adoption, and it get's widespread adoption because it's free.

I love Jupyter, love love love. But there's a lot of hyperbole and opinion here. Mathematica is just a for-profit business, it's that simple. And it wouldn't be fair to deny the example that Mathematica, Maple & Matlab have set for free solutions like Jupyter.

There's nothing dishonest about a for-profit business. And if Mathematica wants to keep PDF export for themselves, so be it, that's their right. What's dishonest is expecting technical software and service for free and calling people names like vandals if you don't get it. Just celebrate Jupyter and enjoy that people are doing great work you get to use without paying. I don't love Mathematica or it's founder, but there's no real need to impugn Mathematica in order to make this point.