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Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#11

Post by antoinealb »

wyldfire wrote: post #10
VHRanger wrote: post #8

1 - 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.

Even native python is not as slow as people expect. And scientific languages are terribly slow, see for example loops in Matlab, which are terribly slow.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#12

Post by silvestrov »

TLDR: some types of software needs more than programming.

omitted TLDR: some of the above can only be done by paying people money to do them. Company needs income for that.

omitted exibit: why haven't Gimp thrown Photoshop, Pixelmater and others from the throne. If programmers were the only people needed, then all those commercial image editors would be gone from the market. (but a unix shell only needs programming by a single person, so there are no commercial successful unix shells)

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#13

Post by ozim »

bborud wrote: post #2

It 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.

I don't really know but lets play their advocate.

Probably they are stuck in academia market or really research market because that is who they know and this is their target audience.

Moving to more enterprise context would cost them effort, they would have to hire enterprise sales people and spend money on making new connections.

Then to gain real foothold they would have to implement security/auditing/SSO and other enterprise requirements. Which would be quite heavy investment and quite high risk one, because they will never know if any of it will be useful. Like they get first customer, roll out all of that and then growth stagnates and maybe they are stuck on 2-3 customers who keep making demands, but there is no growth to cover for the "enterprise features" investments.

Keep in mind also that not everyone wants to be a unicorn, if they are happy with what they have and roll with it, it is also fine.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#16

Post by sidpatil »

antoinealb wrote: post #11
wyldfire wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even native python is not as slow as people expect. And scientific languages are terribly slow, see for example loops in Matlab, which are terribly slow.

FORTRAN, the OG of scientific languages, is not slow. In fact, that's why it's still used to this day.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#19

Post by esjeon »

VHRanger wrote: post #8

1 - 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.

Yeah, so I usually consider Mathematica as a fast prototyping tool. It offers some optimization tools(i.e. packed array, compile), but I find myself rewriting a significant portion of the program while trying to apply them. They work, but often not worth the effort.

Still, it offers a very good set of features, and it's cleaner than some popular python libraries.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#20

Post by throw_m239339 »

paxys wrote: post #7

Most 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.

I mean, also Blender (written in pure C, Python scripting for UI). Pretty sure it's as complex as Wolfram at that point. Largely financed by private corporations now, still open source.

The irony is that Blender USED to be a proprietary project, the community had to buy back the source code.

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