301–310 of 358 posts
"Free for Developers" is misleading, since you can't distribute it with your software for free, or modify it, which is generally what developers want to do. It's essentially a trial.
Has anyone got anything really cool with the Wolfram language that they've prototyped / seen prototyped elsewhere?
https://www.wolfram.com/language/11/image-and-signal-process...
However, I think, what they should have done is have an open-sourced language runtime, and closed source some subset of the libraries.
In other words, keep eco-system open-sourced (and also protected from patent abuse), while maintaining some libraries closed source.
Perhaps, Wolfram believes that the competitive/money making advantage is in the engine, not in the libraries.
But if that's the case, then the open source competition is closer to beating it, than we think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers" I'm a bit puzzled about how strongly you seem to be feeling about this topic. Given your comments, you seem to be quite far from the target audience of Mathematica. It's not for software engineers. Most productive work done with Mathematica is not "building software" ... But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all…
I do computer mathematics. I’m the author of a computational group theory package [2], and my day job is in quantum mechanics and quantum computation, but in that I’m building packages in a software engineering capacity. The algebra gets pretty gnarly. Check out a recent paper, which includes both a math [0] and SW [1] component. Perhaps because of this I’m unusually representative of the intersection between math an…
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that the idea of this announcement? Free to start, pay when you deploy.
No, Unity allows commercial uses either for free in some circumstances, or very, very cheap, so long as your annual revenue is less than $2M. That makes it a no-brainer to use--you pay little or no licensing fees until your game takes off. Unity makes their money off the unpredictable winners, while gifting a nearly free product to the hobbyist and startup ecosystem. Wolfram Engine is more like the Epic Games (Unreal…
Interesting that some comments which are insightful and anti wolf clan are deleted . Seems like Hackernews and wolf clan are in cahots
> 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…
>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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of Wolframs reply to why Wolfram is not open-source: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...
This blog post conflates open source with a community development model.
1 Fear of losing control (over their vision and centralized design of computation and representation of the Wolfram language).
This is just false, as they would be in control over their project even if open-sourced.
Forks would be possible but would not influence the original source (if not wanted).
I cannot see why this would be true.
I see how that could be a problem. One solution would be funding (s. point below)
to pay devs for the boring stuff.
Their main point (and probably a big issue of a lot of other companies
thinking about open-sourcing their software) and a very valid one indeed.
@Wolfram: The most important assets of Wolfram are the devs. working there, not the software itself. Given this huge knowledge base around the topics covered by the Wolfram language, the support-business-modell could very well work! Also from a philosophical point of view: Wolfram claims to unify disparate fields of all of science which kind of is a scientific achievement on its own. Scientific results should be available for all people of our society.