Pricing is opaque. https://www.wolfram.com/engine/commercial-options/ How can I figure out if it's worth investing the time if it's impossible to price a production license?
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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
231–240 of 358 posts
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem with it being closed-source is that it doesn't form a stable platform for my work. If they decide to change their product in incompatible ways in the future, I'm sunk. I have no recourse, I cannot fix the problem if it goes deep enough, and there are no other implementations. I learned this lesson (albeit from a distance) when Microsoft killed off Visual Basic 6 and replaced it with Visual Basic .Net.
I agree. Plus, you can't peer into the layers underneath your software – if I'm writing code in Python or R, everything underneath me is there for inspection, if needed. A closed source solution, where all you have is documentation (potentially flawed), including manually authored change information, just feels archaic at this point.
A lot of people use AWS though, right? It's about trust. Not trust in a "Amazon are good people I trust them" but more like "Amazon incentives are aligned with mine for this project, and I trust that using their platform wont f' me up down the line".
Companies should derive that trust factor from other factors based on their unique circumstances. If you are Amazon's competitor for instance it is probably not wise to use AWS for anything, but if you are a startup it could be very wise to take a bit of lock-in to avoid rolling your own infrastructure. If you are an established company maybe use AWS but in a way that you could move to another provider without too much pain, but balance that against some of the goodies you get by staying locked in.
I guess the same nuanced considerations have to be made to decide to use Wolfram Engine or not. There is no clear answer that suits all end users.
I've been reading as much as I can on RMS's site recently because I want to expand my mind on these sorts of topics. I really want to understand how "free" software can work at a practical level, where you say "here is a piece of software, it's $1000 from me, and you are free to give it to your friends, modify it, and resell it, even to people who would have paid me $1000, but now they wont need to" and how that ties in with making a sustainable business. I think it takes some luck and good imagination to make such a business work by selling some by-product such as consulting services or whatever. But for a lot of companies non-free is required in my opinion to exist as a business. Happy to have my mind changed.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can someone confirm this? The Algorithmbase is 99.999% of what makes Mathematica useful compared to any language with a decent REPL or notebook setup. I can't really imagine a use case for the Wolfram Language if I'm not going to use anything listed in http://www.wolfram.com/algorithmbase/
From the article "...with all its computational intelligence, algorithms, knowledgebase, and so on"
But the "its" that the article is referring to is the Wolfram Engine. It doesn't say that is all the algorithms in Mathematica. And the Mathematica website lists Algorithm Base and Wolfram Engine as two separate line items, which is at least surprising if one is contained in the other.
I actually believe the Algorithm Base is probably included, but it's definitely anything but clear from the website or any of the press release. The Mathematica website makes them seem like two completely separate unconnected components.
It's really unclear what is included in Wolfram Engine and what is included only in Mathematica... the above was just one obvious example. It would be very nice to have a concise list.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#234Pricing is opaque. https://www.wolfram.com/engine/commercial-options/ How can I figure out if it's worth investing the time if it's impossible to price a production license?
Just ask.
Warning: it's ridiculously expensive. You need to be charging your users 4+ figures per license for your software in order to be able to pay Wolfram their cut.
The open/libre stuff is a huge red herring -- cost is the real bottleneck. It doesn't make any sense to use Wolfram/Mathematica unless there's a built-in function that you NEED, for which there is no alternative, and which requires a team of PhDs to re-implement.
E.g., even a non-production single user corporate desktop license is $3K.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take Lisp code written in the last 50 years and odds are that Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp or Scheme can run it with zero/minimal/moderate modifications. Clojure needs a total and complete rewrite which doesn't only affect the syntax but program logic. Thus Clojure does not run Lisp code. How can it be a Lisp when it does not run Lisp code?
I've actually ported some Clojure code to Common Lisp no later than two weeks ago and it was pretty much as straightforward (if not more) as porting R5RS to CL. In my (admittedly limited) experience both CL and Clojure favor a certain high-level coding style with complicated macros versus the more simplistic style of Scheme. Contrast CL's loop construct, Clojure's for statement and Scheme's typically more recursive a…
The chance that you can port code without actually rewriting it is pretty slim. But then, people have been rewriting Lisp code to run in C++.
If you want TCO in CL then use one of the dozen implementations which supports it.
People btw. used to write some non-trivial code which ran in both Scheme and CL with the help of a Scheme on top CL, a compatibility layer or a translator. But that's now relatively rare.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take Lisp code written in the last 50 years and odds are that Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp or Scheme can run it with zero/minimal/moderate modifications. Clojure needs a total and complete rewrite which doesn't only affect the syntax but program logic. Thus Clojure does not run Lisp code. How can it be a Lisp when it does not run Lisp code?
This argument only works if you think of "Lisp" as a single, linearly developing language. It hasn't been that for decades. (That's why they created "Common" Lisp, after all.) Lisp is a family of languages - within which Scheme and CL are just as syntactically incompatible as CL and Clojure.
CL was created such that it is compatible with a main line of Lisp dialects (those btw. have usually Lisp in their name) -> Lisp 1, Lisp 1.5, MacLisp, ZetaLisp then Common Lisp.
Other Lisps in that main line are Portable Standard Lisp, Le-Lisp, Emacs Lisp, ISLisp, ...
There are quite a few branches with less (Scheme) or more incompatible languages (ML, Dylan, Clojure, ...).
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll add to the list: mathematical modelling, optimization, control, essentially all machine learning, etc. Except for perhaps optimizers (which some of the best are closed source, e.g. Mosek), the entire rest of the stack is open source.
CUDA is not open source.
Without the proprietary and exclusive hardware, something like CUDA would DoA. Wolfram is trying that, as MathCad and Maple did back in the day and still MATHLAB kind of pulled off (Octave is coming though). This is a pretty steep slope they're fighting against because many programmers don't want to give away that sort of control easily. I remember when closed-source SmallTalk was the norm in the 90s, also Fortran systems or EIFFEL. Borland, Delphi, Watcom did okay for some time but they didn't lock you in so hard - it was "something standard with extensions" (a bit like C# which by the way, I avoid on these grounds alone).
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source has a clear definition. The kind of license you want is not compatible with that. It would be a valid software license, but not open source.
I think you are conflating “free software” with “open source.”
No. See https://opensource.org/osd
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#239Just a quick reminder; my MIT licensed open source project Resin [0] does pretty much of what WA does. It's free today and it will be free tomorrow. Free to use in production, to clone, fork, tear apart. Like WA - it's a linguistic engine - it has a query language - there is a cloud you can use [1] if you don't want to host it on-premise - it has high level API's for creating language models from JSON documents (or i…
Can it analyze dynamical systems, solve complicated integrals, reduce and solve equations, display dynamic plots of all these things, do social network analysis, statistics, machine learning and data wrangling all in one notebook, out of the box, with simple calls?
As a reminder, nothing in the Wolfram universe is really unique, nor it is the best individual implementation.
The selling point of any Wolfram product and its underlying engine is that it can do all these things out of the box, in one notebook or WA query.
I am not trying to be an ass. It just really seems you misunderstand the "competition". There is a failure path for your project:
It COULD do anything, but it actually CAN'T do much out of the box. This limits your target audience to people who want to implement WA themselves, but with a framework. Please do consider this is not what WA offers. At all.
Re: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. Imagine saying this with a straight face. Maybe in web development, but the vast majority of programmers are using closed source tools to produce closed source software. You're either thinking of a tiny picture vs the whole picture (web devs vs programming…
I’m open to being wrong, but my domain is not and has not been web apps. It’s mostly been things like satellite antenna control software, quantum computers, scientific computing, and AI. Each of those domains, in my experience, has been firmly grounded in open source. (It does not mean, of course, that the end product is open source.) I recognize there are some domains that are steeped in closed source solutions with…
>It’s mostly been things like satellite antenna control software
IME even getting binaries from an antenna vendor can be like pulling teeth, are there some good open source solutions out there?