Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
blog.wolfram.com
Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
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Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#2It would be more interesting to address why they chose a pricing model that guaranteed their products would never be a more mainstream consumer product and pretty much irrelevant for almost all enterprise contexts where a computational or analytical capability is needed.
Because I don't think they are so stupid this wasn't a conscious decision on their part.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#3Mr Crabs: MONEY!
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#4I understand Mr. Wolfram's decision to be a billionaire with a small army of brilliant persons at his beck and call. I also understand his desire to keep complete control of what he's built. All that being said, I sincerely hope he makes provisions to make his work Free at some point after his death. Because, if he doesn't, lacking his admittedly ingenius leadership, it will be lost to obscurity at best. That would be a shame for humanity.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#5Most of these are about wanting control over the design of the software - but releasing their code doesn't have any impact on that - I don't get it? Java is open source - Oracle still tightly controls and manages the design of Java.
For example 'Bad design is expensive' - how releasing your source lead to bad design? That's a complete non-sequitur.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#6Almost none of the reasons have anything to do with releasing the source. You can release the source but still maintain central control. They shouldn’t even have posted this. Obviously they want to make money from their products, and that’s fine.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#7Most of their points are valid for community driven open source projects but the existence of large corporate ones like Chrome, Android, .net, VS Code, Tensorflow and lots more prove that exerting tight central control while being fully open source is very much possible.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#81 - 11: $$
12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast
I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#9This is just the usual "proprietary software is higher quality, we swear".
Accurately voicing my thoughts on this would probably go against the HN guidelines, so I'll just let this sentence from the article speak for itself:
>But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited.
Well, good luck with that.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#101 - 11: $$ 12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.
At first I thought, "how could anything be slower than python?" And then I figured that you probably would've ported it to leverage things like numpy which makes a lot of operations into native code and takes advantage of highly optimized blas libs, etc.