Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#1

Post by halirutan » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source
blog.wolfram.com

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#2

Post by eMerzh » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

It's me or a lot of those points don't explain anything? I totally get they don't want to open source it as a company but don't try to give false reason for it.

It's not because it's open source that you can't have quality, central design, or good documentation.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#3

Post by sigdigs » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community.

I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#4

Post by baud147258 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

sigdigs wrote: post #3

1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community. I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?

nitpick: throes, not throws

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#5

Post by wjnc » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#6

Post by mimixco » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

sigdigs wrote: post #3

1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community. I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?

Indeed. And what nonsense about cohesive design. There's nothing cohesive about the design of Wolfram functions and parameters. Often, they're not even documented!

Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#7

Post by vbuwivbiu » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

Linux is an example of an open source project with centralized design & management and a unified vision.

Mathematica is a brilliant product, and more people would use it if it was open source but it's ok that's it not.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#8

Post by yummypaint » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

mimixco wrote: post #6

sigdigs wrote: post #3

1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community. I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?

Indeed. And what nonsense about cohesive design. There's nothing cohesive about the design of Wolfram functions and parameters. Often, they're not even documented! Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.

Agreed. It definitely has its uses, but it lacks the self-consistency needed to be a language. Alot of this is for understandable historical reasons, but it has never been smoothed out as it would be in a project with more community involvement. Again that's ok.

Maybe we need something to be to mathematica as octave is to matlab.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#9

Post by pilchardbreath » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

mimixco wrote: post #6

sigdigs wrote: post #3

1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community. I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?

Indeed. And what nonsense about cohesive design. There's nothing cohesive about the design of Wolfram functions and parameters. Often, they're not even documented! Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.

Undocumented is not one of its problems: There are 10,000+ pages at http://reference.wolfram.com Not just every function, but many arguments have their own pages - every import format, entity type, method. The problem is finding the right function.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#10

Post by thrillgore » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

Does anyone remember his book "A New Kind of Science" which was a really discredited, unoriginal, hack-fraudish, non-scientifically vetted essay on cellular automata?