171–180 of 316 posts
I feel sorry for the schlubs who have to write these corporate blogs.
Also, everyone here over 40 would prefer going back in time to closed-source. Yes, M$ would still reign supreme, but at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy.
Almost 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.
(Plus, I think putting Stephen Wolfram at the top of a Linux kernel-type project is unlikely to work well at all.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. The name Sun Microsystems is one that I, and most people, associated with microsystems - with workstations (and servers). Sun was founded in 1982 with Bill Joy as a founder, who was already a…
This is a bit meta, but why does everyone refer to a company's revenue instead of profit or margins? Ignoring operating costs, if you manufacture 1M units for 20M dollars and sell them for 19M, you have a revenue of 19M despite losing money, so revenue says almost nothing about a company by itself
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…
> 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'm a suspicious, cynical person, so I think that's deliberate.
Conflation is a very useful rhetorical trick.
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.
>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? [...] how releasing your source lead to bad design? 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…
The four essential freedoms[1] might not make you rich, but they will keep providing you with true freedom.
Wolfram Mathematica would be a more valuable contribution to the future of humankind, if the essential freedoms were guaranteed.
[1] gnu.org The Free Software Definition: The four essential freedoms.
Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer modeled the growth of plants[1]. Each has a shape, which evolved to exploit a certain terrain. Mathematica exploits one terrain. Sun Microsystems exploited another terrain with Java.
I wonder if it possible to map these terrains across all the Github projects?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There will always be friction with what is on the roadmap vs what the community wants to add. Open source does not necessitate listening to the community. Ever. Even if they were to release it under an OSS license, they could just turn off PRs. Or if it's "source available", same story.
Then the community forks the OSS project and you lose control/struggle to maintain parity/mindshare. Gogs/Gitea, VIM/Neovim, Bitwarden/Vaultwarden... The ones that succeed keep the community happy and either focus on adding value on top (open core, don't give away the special sauce) or deliver half assed products (package up the community leftovers and hope support contracts/services fill in the gaps).
That shouldn't matter if you're making a superior product.
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.
Wolfram here were contrasting their model against the idea that products like Mathematica could have been developed in a fully “open source” manner. (It’s a false binary, but it’s what they’re doing.) “Open source” is a different thing than “source-available” or “shared-source.” Many closed-source products are “source-available” in the manner you’re talking about, but this does not make them “open source.” You’re not…
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.
>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? [...] how releasing your source lead to bad design? 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…