Needs (2019)
Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
71–80 of 316 posts
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#72TLDR: 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 b…
> so there are no commercial successful unix shells
The most successful commercial unix shells are graphical shells shipped with operating systems. Most users consider the visual function of these shells to be the actual operating system. I.e. "MacOS now has scrollbars in preferences!"
MacOS, iOS, Android all are good examples.
To build a shell of commercial value you end up having to do a little more that a command line shell does.
BTW, the biggest part of Adobe's value prop is AdobeStock templates, fonts, stock art and stock video. This makes it really easy to start a project and get to done quickly.
It would be interesting to see some of the third party marketplaces like Envato, Issuu and CreativeMarket plugins for open source products... And non-Adobe products, too (Affinity, love the products! Badly need a way to quickly get a few hundred templates in there... Corel, your ecosystem is a dumpster fire)
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#73Most 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.
This seems too obvious to repeat, but Google and Microsoft fund Chrome and VS Code through the profits from their other products like Search and Windows. Wolfram doesn't have that, and most businesses don't. It's very easy for us say "just make it open source" if we don't have to come up with a way of paying people! Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay…
That's fine. The bullets should just read "we can't figure out a FOSS business model" instead of calling it a code quality problem.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#74Anthropologists should study open source communities. Would give more insight into how cults form.
Jon’s essay was insightful and elucidating. Truly. And it seems like they’re accomplishing their goals.
I haven’t read a single comment that steelman’s his position and criticizes it well.
Thanks for the essay though. It was lovely.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#75I really think Wolfram missed a huge opportunity in mid 2000’s. They basically had the best interactive programming experience by far. Mathematica should/could have been an essential tool for all data scientists. I still prefer Mathematica interface over Jupyter.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#76Most 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.
They are arguing it does have impact on that. The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success. So I think it's realistic to at least engage with their argument seriously rather than dismiss it. The argument is that open source licenses are inc…
You've made the mistake of expressing an unpopular opinion, so you're getting down voted. I strongly dislike proprietary software, but you raise valid concerns that should be considered instead of being downvoted into silence. (edit: at the time I wrote this comment, the parent appeared to be headed for oblivion, happily that appears to have improved)
I don't know that open sourcing Java killed Sun. More likely it was Intel coming close enough to SPARC performance at a lower price, and Linux coming close enough to Enterprise reliability also at a lower price. But it's certainly true that open sourcing Java and Solaris didn't save Sun.
Likewise, open sourcing Mozilla didn't save Netscape. In fact, I would bet the vast majority of companies that start out proprietary before deciding to open source ultimately die because they're already unhealthy and doing it as an act of desperation.
If a company isn't designed from the start to support an open source model, it's very hard to make the transition and survive. And we have no right to demand they try. Just like everyone should respect the license F/OSS authors choose, everyone should respect Wolfram's right to stay proprietary.
Of course it's also important to remember that proprietary software vendors are more likely to yank the carpet from under their users without warning. Instead of demanding the vendor open source, users should just find and support open alternatives.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#771 - 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.
It might be a situation like the R language, where the language itself is too flexible to optimize well.
Loops and function calls in R are (or were, last I checked on R 3.x) yet another order of magnitude slower than CPython.
The flipside is that CPython itself has apparently gotten a lot faster in recent versions. In my unscientific homegrown testing, it beats even LuaJIT on string processing tasks.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#78Just use (A)GPL. Blender, OBS, and VLC use GPL and stay high quality open source software.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#79I’m sorry to say that I was shocked by this article. I have no objection to Wolfram remaining closed source - if they prefer that model and want to make money from it then it’s up to them.
However, that they feel that they have to justify this by implying that their approach is clearly superior to open source in innovation, long term commitment and user experience I’m afraid leaves me with a rather negative impression (to put it mildly!). A lot of open source is flawed but some disproves these assertions comprehensively.
If they really wanted to ‘unify all of computation into a single coherent language’, which sounds like a mammoth task, they would surely welcome quality contributions - beyond just picking up and using other open source projects - from whoever feels able to make them rather than a small group of individuals working in private.
Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)
#80Most 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.
>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. All of your examples are subsidized by a parent corporate sponsor that makes billions from something else . Chrome can be "free as in beer" and Chromium source can be "free as in libre" because Google/Alphabet make billi…
Yes, and I'd also add that being a rounding error probably isn't enough to justify the business decision.
Usually the reason that big companies open source big longstanding projects is to commoditize a complement of their main business:
- Search makes billions of dollars, and you need a web browser to search, so Google should make a fast and secure web browser (not to mention you can fill it with all sorts of dark patterns!)
- Users purchase Windows to run applications like spreadsheets. We should offer a free high quality IDE so that more applications can be made, increasing the value of the ecosystem.
- Java: Sun sells hardware, and software is the complement to hardware, so we should make a new programming language (???). To be honest, this one always seemed suspect, and maybe that explains why Sun went out of business :-/
https://www.gwern.net/Complement
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/