Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

blog.wolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#61

Post by sigdigs »

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.

Not sure why my original comment was flagged. I suspect W's PR people have found this thread and started damage control.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#62

Post by billfruit »

Atleast they could include the source, with a paid purchase. Many software like vxworks will give you the source, which you can yourself rebuild, if you pay for a license. More commercial software should be bundling source code with paid licenses.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#63

Post by undecisive »

coldtea wrote: post #48
undecisive wrote: post #31

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 lov…

His claims is not that Wolfram can't be Open Source (and be what it is). He gives "12 reasons why [he] think[]s that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model". I.e. his concern is not whether a project can be open sourced (and make money, or keep its vision, etc). Sure it can. His concern is whether something like Wolfram can be built up the "bazaar" wa…

Interesting. I read that as a future-looking statement, justifying the past as an indicator of the future.

Consider the statement "I don't think I could have survived if I was forced to cycle to work every day!" While I'm not saying it outright, I'm making it clear that tomorrow I will not be cycling to work.

At the end, he almost does say it outright: "But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited." In other words, don't hold your breath for it to happen in the future - it doesn't fit with our vision.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#64

Post by oaiey »

noblethrasher wrote: post #60
mythz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're only central R&D because MS employ most of the paid dev resources working on it and no one would use any forks except from MS (or possibly Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing resources in maintaining a fork) so there's no risk of fragmentation. That definitely doesn't apply to all projects, you can look at the successful forks of Oracle's OSS acquired products. If the OSS'ed code-base…

> or possibly Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing resources in maintaining a fork. While they're not maintaining a fork, it's worth noting that the head of the ECMA C# standards committee is, in fact, a prominent Google employee.

"prominent" ... What a modest description :)

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#65

Post by oaiey »

mythz wrote: post #29
oaiey wrote: post #28

.NET and the languages C# and VisualBasic.NET are open source (definitely not free software) but tightly developed by one central R&D. I find the second argument especially weak. You can be completely open source (and probably even free) without giving up any control over your distribution.

They're only central R&D because MS employ most of the paid dev resources working on it and no one would use any forks except from MS (or possibly Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing resources in maintaining a fork) so there's no risk of fragmentation. That definitely doesn't apply to all projects, you can look at the successful forks of Oracle's OSS acquired products. If the OSS'ed code-base…

Totally right. And the copyright like Oracle does/did. However, the same applies to Wolfram Research. I do not disagree to them being closed source for e.g. monetarily reason, just for this argument of language control.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#66

Post by coldtea »

undecisive wrote: post #63
coldtea wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His claims is not that Wolfram can't be Open Source (and be what it is). He gives "12 reasons why [he] think[]s that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model". I.e. his concern is not whether a project can be open sourced (and make money, or keep its vision, etc). Sure it can. His concern is whether something like Wolfram can be built up the "bazaar" wa…

Interesting. I read that as a future-looking statement, justifying the past as an indicator of the future. Consider the statement "I don't think I could have survived if I was forced to cycle to work every day!" While I'm not saying it outright, I'm making it clear that tomorrow I will not be cycling to work. At the end, he almost does say it outright: "But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a si…

When he says ("But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited") is not that Wolfram can't be made open source nominally (e.g. "we make it, we control development completely, I call the shots, but it's just under GPL" for example).

His emphasis is that Wolfram was not, and in his opinion will never be, a good fit for the "FOSS development model" (what I call "bazaar-style" in my comment above).

Considering that he thinks that Wolfram couldn't be developed in the "FOSS development model", and that he things that model is not suited for Wolfram, it's also unlikely that he will open source it either. Since there's no much purpose in open sourcing something that doesn't benefit from that model. You just give your product away for free (beer/freedom) with no benefit for either the product or you.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#67

Post by hjk05 »

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…

You are arguing against higher level abstractions. Absolutely nothing in your post is in anyway specifi to Mathematica. You could substitute the language and the api call to any other and have the same argument.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#68

Post by raphar »

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…

In an OSS, that sentence would never have survived a review. Or someone would have implemented a saner option.

In a product with an explicit owner, all you'd hear is "yes boss".

Is not that one want wolfram to be oss, one (me) wants a product with wolfram abilites and features, that you can grow, expand, correct, etc.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#69

Post by esjeon »

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…

You're nitpicking, and you do need to "read the docs", or at least understand the language. Wolfram language is Lisp-like, and is fully symbolic. This allows some definitive programming, and Mathematica does take advantage of this.

Graphics in Mathematica is symbolic (according to the documentation). You can think of it as a Lisp-based vector graphics. It's still possible to manipulate pixel data extracted w/ "ImageData". It's just that "Image" object never allows direct pixel manipulation, which is the same in some other frameworks.

Also, "Style" is a function, not a block, that attaches styling information to its first argument. "Text" is a graphics primitive that provides placing information for text inside "Graphic". "GeoGraphic" is not neccessary here, and you can load map images with "GeoImage", and "Inset" them into graphics object. "GeoGraphics" is only good for rendering map-related data, like country borders, regions, roads, names, etc.

Wolfram language has its own patterns, and is pretty solid. Personally, I like it because it fully abuses its Lisp-like design, yet everything is curated by one single sane entity. I just dont want to endure a bunch of pretty hax0rs who never stop coming up with half-baked in-house solutions.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#70

Post by esjeon »

While using Mathematica, you don't need to go out to fetch some random 3rd party tools, because most components are already built into it. What makes it better is that combining those components is well streamlined, and there's little need for costly plumbing.

Paywall does suck, but someone gotta curate all those shits. Mathematica is a good platform not only because of some advanced algorithms built into it, but also because of the curation from Wolfram. Curating software component is one of the least fun job in the world, and any entities who do it properly should be paid for the sake longevity of their roles.

Post reply on HN