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Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

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

#181

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #171

Only relevant sentence: "Salaries are a good motivation." 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.

> 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.

That's a very strong claim. MS sucked without FOSS competition, and is quite happy to drive the surveillance economy.

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

#182

Post by LanceH »

zepto wrote: post #142
chrisseaton wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it commoditized CPU architectures by providing an abstraction layer over them I think that was part of the point - let people run their existing applications on Sun hardware. Yes it was more expensive but it was also more capable. Emphasising running on lots of smaller 'commodity' instances wasn't yet the done thing at the time.

You are right that it was the point. It was simply a bad goal. Sun hoped it would allow people to migrate to their hardware, when instead it enabled them to migrate away, or to never have to choose.

I think it had little to do with that. Every year Sun had bigger and bigger computers like we needed bigger monolithic servers. Run an ISP and need 100,000 user telnet accounts? Bigger computer! Then, seemingly overnight, the problem is solved by buying a hundred blades instead, and paying nothing for except hardware.

Sun was riding high on the dotcom era where every new company ran out and bought an E10000, and maybe one with less specs for a development server. I've heard stories of these being shipped before payment just so they could declare the sales early -- once the bloodbath started, it Sun was left holding the bag.

BSD and Linux on commodity hardware killed everything at Sun and Java really had nothing to do with it.

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

#183

Post by rg111 »

Let me tell you how tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of students totally skipped Wolfram products and proprietary science products in general.

Wolfram products are very highly priced, even much more so for the Indian market.

Indian science and engineering colleges are usually very poorly funded save some IITs and premier provincial universities.

There is no way in hell these colleges could ever have afforded MATLAB or Wolfram products.

C and ForTran were taught at science institues- even at the very best ones.

Students only learned this.

By the year 2018, all of science universities of India fully switched to Python for Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. majors.

They now teach NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, etc.

They totally skipped Wolfram and Mathworks products.

Why do I say "skipped"? Because with rapid economic growth and visible improvements in college fundings, Indian unis would have soon been able to afford proprietary science software. But they skipped it.

They went straight from ForTran and C to Python ecosystem.

Now, the market is flooded with thousands of core science grads with Python skills who have never worked with MATLAB or Mathematica.

They are the losers in their models.

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

#184

Post by hsnewman »

Wow, I'm supprised at all the false reasons, that are based on incorrect assumptions. For example, "bad design is expensive", the assumption is that Open Source has bad design. The assumption also is that Closed source is therefore good design. How can you know that a piece of software you can't see the source to has a better design than one you CAN see the source to? Just wow. edit: to add to the expensive note: paying for a license yearly for eternity is supposidly cheaper than free?

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

#185

Post by sudosysgen »

jasode wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #5

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…

Probably the exception is Blender, which is a big, complex GUI with gobs of features and is very compétitive.

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

#186

Post by jimmyvalmer »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #181
jimmyvalmer wrote: post #171

Only relevant sentence: "Salaries are a good motivation." 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.

> 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. That's a very strong claim. MS sucked without FOSS competition, and is quite happy to drive the surveillance economy.

Classic ignoratio elenchi triggered by emotional response to M$.

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

#187

Post by analog31 »

jasode wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #5

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…

I believe GUI is a huge part of it. My rationale is that sweating the details of the GUI actually requires a profound amount of work, that is not at the top of the list of things that programmers enjoy working on. The the only way to get it done is to hire an army of well paid programmers to do it. And things like office and graphics software are nothing without GUI.

Second, some software builds on a body of proprietary domain knowledge that someone happens to own. I'd put mechanical CAD in that category. Probably the symbolic computing technology of Mathematica as well. In some cases, users of specialized engineering software actually put up with horrifying user interfaces because the software vendor has a lock on the domain knowledge.

The successes of open source include anything without a user interface, such as the infrastructure of the universe, and non domain specific programming tools.

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

#188

Post by nikoraisu »

jasode wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #5

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…

And in this alternate past history, how would they have generated an income? I think your clarification is spot-on, and the debate around whether they could or would have been out-competed is an interesting one, but fundamentally they need to be able to generate revenue somehow.

I totally get open-source for libraries/components/building blocks/etc, and strategies like “commoditise your complements” have been mentioned elsewhere. But I’m struggling to see how open-sourcing the actual end-user product isn’t just literally giving away everything for free?

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

#189

Post by bborud »

analog31 wrote: post #36
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 think to make it mainstream would require making it different. The number of people who actually have a use for Mathematica is pretty small. Very few people understand both math and programming. Most people who can program are already employed as programmers. In a larger organization, rather than buying 10 licenses for 200 bucks each, it's better to buy 1 license for 2000 bucks and have everybody bring their math w…

Well, let's for arguments sake consider the most important demographic in my mind: me :-). (That's what most people do anyway).

Joking aside. I'd love to make Mathematica part of my toolbox, but the steep pricing makes me think about all the other software I pay license fees on that I depend on, and I need another software expense like I need a third buttock.

If it wasn't a recurring license, or a recurring license at a significantly lowered price, that would make it different.

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

#190

Post by samhw »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #101
chrisseaton wrote: post #5

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.

Open source can either mean "publish the source" or "run it as a community project". Most of the benefits of open source (for the company) would come from running it as a community project, which would imply giving up some of the control. Simply throwing the code over the wall without accepting contributions doesn't meaningfully benefit the company. There are of course graduations between "don't accept any contributi…

> Open source can either mean "publish the source" or "run it as a community project".

This is exactly it. I'm amazed that so few people in this thread are recognising this key ambiguity which underpins the confusion. As Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus[0]:

> 3.323 In the language of everyday life it very often happens that the same word signifies in two different ways — and therefore belongs to two different symbols — or that two words, which signify in different ways, are apparently applied in the same way in the proposition. Thus the word "is" appears as the copula, as the sign of equality, and as the expression of existence; "to exist" as an intransitive verb like "to go"; "identical" as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening. (In the proposition "Green is green" — where the first word is a proper name and the last an adjective — these words have not merely different meanings but they are different symbols.)

> 4.003 [...] Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)

[0] Hilariously republished here by Buzzfeed as '7 Fantastic Ways To Distinguish Between Sense And Nonsense': https://www.buzzfeed.com/ludwigwittgenstein/fantastic-ways-t... It's such a mindblowingly profound work of philosophy, especially the kinds of philosophy that programmers are often unknowingly engaged in, that I feel you just can't read it all at once. You have to keep referring back to tiny chunks of it, as you start to understand their meaning and significance through epiphanies arising from particular concrete problems you wrestle with in your life.

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