111–120 of 316 posts
Why not just say they want to monetize it?
Arguably even pure, single monetizing argument can be challanged as their adoption would increase tenfold, if not more and there are tons of ways to monetize popular technology.
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> The argument is that open source licenses are incompatible with the kind paid license they're offering their customers. I don’t see them making that argument in all these points. For example they say > Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you Well ok that’s a valid point so… don’t do that. Crowd sourcing design decisions or code is not a fundamental part of open source. You can have open source but do all the dev…
> I think they’re confusing source licensing with a development methodology. Which is why as nitpicky as it sounds, we should really be making an effort not to use the term "open source" to refer to both.
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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…
Counter: Android is open source.
I have a friend that uses Mathematica, and I had some symbolic math I wanted to run a solver on last week, so I thought I'd give it a try. It wasn't any better than sympy from what I could tell. I ended up taking a monte carlo approach anyway. Generating the simulations was soooo slow in Mathematica compared to numpy. After that demo, I'll have to say the Python ecosystem is far superior for all it's flaws. Sure the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Counter: Android is open source.
Most 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.
The way to interpret his argument is to imagine an alternate past history where Mathematica was open source from the beginning and how that would have lead to an inferior product. He wrote:
>[...] I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model.
So instead of thinking they can just go ahead and open source what they have today and everything would be just fine, we need to consider how game theory would have played out in an alternate universe where they tried FOSS model from the beginning.
Maybe his argument is still flawed but to at least entertain his scenario, let's study other projects and compare:
- open source GIMP is considered very good -- but also is several years behind closed-source Adobe Photoshop in features
- OpenCAD, OpenSCAD not as full-featured as proprietary Autodesk, SolidWorks, etc
- LibreOffice has less features the MS Office
- Code::Blocks and Eclipse as IDE for C++ coding not as good as MS Visual Studio
- OpenStack less features than AWS
- SageMath has less symbolic computing features than Wolfram Mathematica
To counterbalance the above, we can try to identify open source projects that are equal or superior to proprietary solutions:
- LibOpus is superior algorithm to Fraunhofer FDK AAC
- Linux (server) is comparable or superior to MS Windows (Server).
- GCC, Clang comparable to Microsoft "cl.exe" compiler.
Is there a pattern to the above? It seems like a combination of :
- big complex software with lots of features
- GUI
... often means that open-source collaboration model falls behind the proprietary commercial offerings. Why?
So if Wolfram tried to open-source Mathematica from the beginning of its history, a different proprietary XYZ software may have outcompeted them. E.g. the salaried programmers working on today's Mathematica wouldn't have worked on the open-source Mathematica for free because they would have been at XYZ Corporation. In that alternate timeline, we'd complain today that "Mathematica isn't as good as XYZ"
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I don't really understand the definition of open source. I used to hear people say stuff along the lines of "If you just release the source and don't accept patches then that's not real open source" But the opinion on that has changed I guess?
I never heard it that way. If you can fork it, it's open source, even if contributions are not accepted upstream. If upstream accepts patches but does not allow forks, it's not open source. It's about the license, not the project's governance model.
Open source = bazaar-style (highly-decentralized development)
Not open source = cathedral-style (highly-centralized development)
Free software = source code released under a license that grants rights such as freedom to modify, redistribute, own a copy of, etc. (see [1] for the proper definition)
Nonfree software = source code not released under such a license
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
Most 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…
Java ultimately kept their declining hardware and operating systems afloat for longer than they would have been otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
This doesn’t make a good argument that Microsoft is evil, so Silicon Valley created a mythology in which Netscape failed.
Netscape did not bet on open source. It didn’t fail. And the browser has a de facto monopoly anyway in the form of Chrome.
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.
While i can't comment on perf, how much of this is due to a rewrite taking advantage of knowledge learned? Would a rewrite in mathematica have been quicker than 40m?