Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
blog.stephenwolfram.com
Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
1–10 of 358 posts
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#2Sounds reasonable, although I think this term in the license will discourage many people:
“Audit
You will maintain accurate records of Your use of the Free Engine sufficient to show compliance with these Terms and Conditions, and Wolfram will have the right to audit such records to confirm compliance therewith. Upon written notice of an audit from Wolfram, You shall respond within ten (10) business days.”
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#3> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?
It’s not open source.
Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful.
Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he calls his entire enterprise now) must be proprietary and paid-for in order to exist. Maybe it’s true; all of the successful and wildly popular computer algebra systems are closed source. (wxMaxima is rough to use, Axiom has 3 or 4 different forks, each with fewer than 10 developers, SymPy just isn’t there, Sage is absolutely wonderful but not polished or easy to deploy, ...) But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. There is a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s.
I think Wolfram needs to think quite hard about how he wants to get his technology in the hands of developers while maintaining a business. Not that my opinion matters, but if he can manage to do it by open sourcing Wolfram Language, Wolfram Engine, or something like that, while keeping his business intact, I might again consider him to be the genius he was lauded to be in his 20s.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#4Sounds reasonable, although I think this term in the license will discourage many people: “Audit You will maintain accurate records of Your use of the Free Engine sufficient to show compliance with these Terms and Conditions, and Wolfram will have the right to audit such records to confirm compliance therewith. Upon written notice of an audit from Wolfram, You shall respond within ten (10) business days.” https://www…
> Open-source projects approved by Wolfram.
“You can’t use this free thing to make other actually free things.”
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#5> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…
He won't change because society considers him to be a prodigy (for good reasons, see his early work) and he lives in a cloud of success from where its hard to empathize with how most developers or actual users of his tool work. In essence, he found great success with a business model for software appropriate for his time and has done well enough to not have to change anything.
Although, perhaps this step is kind of a result of stagnating growth, IDK.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#6Sounds reasonable, although I think this term in the license will discourage many people: “Audit You will maintain accurate records of Your use of the Free Engine sufficient to show compliance with these Terms and Conditions, and Wolfram will have the right to audit such records to confirm compliance therewith. Upon written notice of an audit from Wolfram, You shall respond within ten (10) business days.” https://www…
> Open-source projects approved by Wolfram. “You can’t use this free thing to make other actually free things.”
Isn't that a common thing for commercial products that are provided for free to students, open source projects, non-profit organisations etc.? You have to prove that you're going to use it for what the license allows.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#7> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…
I don't care that it's not open source, it's a unique technology. Actual algorithms solving actual problems correctly. None of that fuzzy search that you'd get if you used Google. It's an amazing tool in its domain.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#8> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?
- It's arcane/esoteric
- Its capabilities are largely unknown (I have mixed results with wolframalpha even for simple queries. Perhaps programmatic model is more deterministic)
- Its licensing model is murky and needlessly complicated
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#9This looks intriguing, but how many wolframs does it get to the wolfram?
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#10> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he cal…
Hopefully this is the first step in a series of steps to get there.
Doing it in one big jump would probably impact revenue so much that it would take too long for them to grow out of it. Hopefully this change will increase their growth rate without much change to revenue, making it faster to grow out of, and prepare the way for further changes.