Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019) • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by mountainriver » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

carry_bit wrote: post #129

mountainriver wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Open source absolutely works with product management, their are tons of companies doing this today. OSS is a great way to market and up sell to SaaS

But then companies that make their money by upselling to SaaS really don't like it when Amazon comes along, takes the software, and undercuts them in the cloud. The company then scrambles to change their license to disallow that. Wolfram in that sense is just being honest about their motivations by having it be proprietary from the get-go.

There are ways of preventing that like what elastic did. If wolfram honestly wants to be the sole computation language no one is going to pay for that all the time

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

#232

Post by tubby12345 » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #218

civilized wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero chance that Wolfram's products would be "stolen" in this way. No one is interested in developing them but Stephen Wolfram.

I’m sure some cloud provider would love to slap wolfram features on to their existing service offerings as a value-add.

When people say "I'm sure" I'm always just floored. Why are you so sure? Have you spoken to these supposed cloud providers and had them tell you this?

Here's one I'm sure about: no one cares about Mathematica except a couple of schools, professors, and finance wonks who've clung to it since the early days of CAS. The language is wacky enough that no mainstream user would prefer it (even with all of its built-ins) over Matlab or scipy. And I say this as someone that has developed things in Mathematica.

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

#233

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #86

chubot wrote: post #21

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.

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by throwaway19937 » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

jdauriemma wrote: post #193

candiddevmike wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?

> Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?

They would still be faced with knock-offs that either copy code or violate the license; Paint.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History) is an example of this happening for an open source project.

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

#235

Post by jimmyvalmer » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #202

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic ignoratio elenchi triggered by emotional response to M$.

Your claim was that > at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy. and I contend that MS would happily run the surveillance economy just as much while leaving everything else worse off. Not ignoratio elenchi at all.

It's the 1990s during the New York Yankees heyday. Performance enhancing drugs now enable lesser teams to end their dynasty.

My point was that I was a happier baseball fan before the steroid era, even if that meant the hated Yankees would remain dominant. That the Yankees would also have cheated if they'd caught on fast enough is irrelevant.

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

#236

Post by mkl » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

jdauriemma wrote: post #193

candiddevmike wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?

That would be shared source, not open source. Disallowing unauthorised distribution contradicts the definition of "open source".

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

#237

Post by bsder » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #216

anchpop wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, why is blender special? it was originally a closed source program with a small community that became open source later, but it’s evolved massively since then and become much more polished and easier to use, which virtually no open source project can say

KiCAD is another package that I think is fairly competitive at this point. It’s not going to kill Altium, but it’s improved greatly in the last 3 years.

I actually disagree and think Altium will, in fact, be Victim #001 of KiCad. The question becomes: "Is Altium thousand dollars better than KiCad?" And a lot of the time the answer will now be "No."

I already split my designs about 50/50 between Altium and KiCad--and that's before KiCad 6.0 which is imminent (6.0RC2 exists right now).

1) KiCad has one killer feature: it's cross platform.

I would argue that this will, over time, kill anything that isn't. Mostly because "open a VM in the cloud and do all your work there" is becoming really common.

2) PCB software, by and large, doesn't need new features. PCB software does need features that work.

Altium is infuriating with not killing bugs and introducing new ones every release.

3) Altium and bunch are basically blocking access to libraries without a subscription fee. That's going to erase Altium for use by small people. This drives me up a tree because it prevents me from sharing a design.

KiCad will slowly but surely eat everything at the bottom and then start upwards--there's just simply no other decent alternative in the space.

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

#238

Post by monsieurbanana » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #178

candiddevmike wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Then the community forks the OSS project and you lose control/struggle to maintain parity/mindshare That shouldn't matter if you're making a superior product.

Well, yeah. So what's in it for them?

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

#239

Post by mkl » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

mateo1 wrote: post #90

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.

I don't understand why this comment is so high up. It's just really naive to compare mathematica and python on runtime speed as if they're both tools used for the same purpose. Whether you like their choice of syntax or not, wolframs tools are state of the art on what they do. Just don't hammer your nails in with screwdrivers.

Wolfram literally say Mathematica is intended to be for all computational purposes. From the article: "our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language".

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

#240

Post by zepto » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

LanceH wrote: post #182

zepto wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mayb…

I think Java had quite a lot to do with making those BSD and Linux boxes run the kind of software people were using for ‘e-commerce’ back then.