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Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#31

Post by undecisive »

Feels like trolling to me. I suspect this was posted a day late.

As he mentions, there are lots of projects that counter his claims. Linux kernel. Every Open Source high-level language ever. Red hat.

Wolfram isn't open source because they don't want it to be open source. And you know what? They're allowed to do that! They don't need to justify that decision, it's their decision to make.

Without resorting to "they love money too much", I'll give them another, slightly more honest reason: It's certainly not impossible, but open sourcing an established project is hard. Managing a community of contributors AND a community of users is hard. Keeping a steady stream of revenue while you make the transition is haaaaarrrd. Maintaining all the values that he's mentioned while still keeping all your contributors and community happy: HARD.

And if the cost:value ratio is wrong, you don't do it. And if you have lots of other hard problems to solve, adding one more hard problem with fractional value is silly.

Yes, we would love it to be OSS. Maybe this was posted as a way of never having to answer the question again. Just sad that it isn't a little more honest an answer.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#32

Post by codeulike »

jpatokal wrote: post #27

The very concept of unified computation has been largely led by Wolfram. For "unified", try sandboxed, walled harden or evolutionary dead end. Just look at this literal Hello World example: GeoGraphics[Text[Style["Hello!", 150]], GeoRange -> World] In any other language, if I wanted to write some text on a graphic, I would find a routine to load an image into memory and another to render text into that memory. That's…

That's not really fair criticism. The Mathematica approach to things is very different to most other platforms. Have a look at some of the maths stuff and symbolic manipulation stuff, that's the core that it was built out from.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#33

Post by r3bl »

eMerzh wrote: post #2

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.

It's not like anyone can push code to your project once you open source it, you're still the gatekeeper that decides which PR gets accepted and which one does not.

I could understand the argument that sifting through the pull requests would take them too much time that they could spend doing something else, but at least 8/12 of these could be solved by... you know, properly maintaining an open source project.

The article leads me to the conclusion that they have no intention of letting the community drive the company, and I could totally understand that. I don't see how any of the listed reasons could prevent them from making their code source-available without indicating an open source license.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#34

Post by pfortuny »

jpatokal wrote: post #27

The very concept of unified computation has been largely led by Wolfram. For "unified", try sandboxed, walled harden or evolutionary dead end. Just look at this literal Hello World example: GeoGraphics[Text[Style["Hello!", 150]], GeoRange -> World] In any other language, if I wanted to write some text on a graphic, I would find a routine to load an image into memory and another to render text into that memory. That's…

If you look a bit over S.Wolfram’s posts, it looks like the Wolfram Language is just “what he decides based on his tastes and needs”. The syntax/options/quirks are manifold...

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#37

Post by carlob »

Armisael16 wrote: post #17
yummypaint wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.maplesoft.com/compare/mathematica_analysis/ That you haven't heard of it is perhaps telling.

Maple is not FOSS and is not a clone, Mathics is to Mathematica as octave is to Matlab.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#38

Post by mythz »

This is just a PR piece to justify to their customers why they're staying closed source.

The obvious reason is that they'd make a lot less revenue if it were OSS/free. They're right that there's several business models around OSS that have negative side-effects and that just charging for software is the more transparent quid pro quo transaction.

It's ok to sell software, but they should just be transparent about it.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#39

Post by halirutan »

timkam wrote: post #26

Isn't the blog post facilitating the types of open vs. closed source discussions we should stop having as a community? Very little (or nothing) of what McLoone introduces as "reasons" cannot be achieved with an OS approach. In the end, it's a business choice someone has made a long time ago and McLoone is now arguing backwards.

I'm not even sure, why this blog post was necessary in the first place. No one argues that a company needs revenue to pay employees and WRI is trying to maximize its profit. That is absolutely fine. However, claiming that OSS cannot achieve great and well-designed software, just to cover the true reasons is simply wrong. Maybe someone should remind WRI that they use Qt, Cairo, Pango, OpenCV and many more OSS libraries under the hood. Qt, in particular, is almost as old as Mathematica itself when the information on Wikipedia is correct.
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