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Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

blog.wolfram.com

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

#251

Post by derefr »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #192
derefr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are conflating "open source" with "open contribution". https://github.com/jgraph/drawio#open-source-not-open-contri... explains it neatly: > Similar to SQLite, diagrams.net is open source but closed to contributions. > The level of complexity of this project means that even simple changes can break a lot of other moving parts. The amount of testing required is far more than it first seems. If we were to receive a…

No; see my second point definition. A thing is open source if, essentially, people are free to re-mix it; whether that be by modifying it upstream, or by forking it downstream. If there is no ability to make changes and then legally use your own changed version, then the thing is not open source in the way any developer would understand the term.

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

#252

Post by kylehotchkiss »

rg111 wrote: post #183

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…

This article isn’t about the pricing of wolfram software. The price they charge is what it costs to develop, host, and support the software, plus innovate on it. They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software as software these days is as fundamental to education as the buildings we learn in.

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

#253

Post by kylehotchkiss »

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.

Wolfram’s suite of software seems like it’d require very specialized support staff. Maybe the higher price point helps keep the customer support side of the business more maintainable?

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

#254

Post by throwaway2048 »

derefr wrote: post #250
q-big wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re not really an open-source project, in the conventional meaning of the term, until either > 1. Your project starts accepting code contributions from the community (if perhaps after a gruelling code-contribution process); or > 2. Your project’s codebase becomes licensed in a way that allows people to fork it, add their own changes, and then use the result themselves to achieve their own ends (if perhaps only n…

That's why I said "the conventional meaning of the term." Who cares what some organization who just decided to name themselves after the term, defines the term as? It's not a jargon term; it's a word , defined loosely by how people use it and what they intend to mean when they use it.

approximately nobody defines open source as "you can see the source but you aren't free to fork it or modify it"

This is not the conventional meaning of the term, and has repeatedly been used as an avenue to attack the concept in general.

As a comparison, how happy would you be calling a system where you can only vote for candidates approved by a single leader a "Democracy". Under these standards, both the USSR and China are democracies.

The differences matter, it is not pedantry and it is not some organization enforcing "their definition" overtop of what people "commonly think".

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

#255

Post by bsder »

sokoloff wrote: post #244
bsder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

There is no design that I’ll ever do that KiCAD can’t handle. I get the sense that most of the commercial complex PCB (motherboards, phones, etc) are likely to stay Altium for a good long while. Is that not the case?

Those designs probably aren't in Altium. They're probably in something like Mentor Xpedition or Cadence Allegro.

This is why I suggest that Altium is likely to be the first victim.

The non-Altium proprietary systems have a lot of legacy to hold them in place (like parts database integration across your company). In addition, they do have some very advanced features around routing matched memory buses and the like.

If, however, your design doesn't need that, KiCad will cover you, and Altium won't bring anything you need to the table.

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

#256

Post by derefr »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #254
derefr wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "the conventional meaning of the term." Who cares what some organization who just decided to name themselves after the term, defines the term as? It's not a jargon term; it's a word , defined loosely by how people use it and what they intend to mean when they use it.

approximately nobody defines open source as "you can see the source but you aren't free to fork it or modify it" This is not the conventional meaning of the term, and has repeatedly been used as an avenue to attack the concept in general. As a comparison, how happy would you be calling a system where you can only vote for candidates approved by a single leader a "Democracy". Under these standards, both the USSR and C…

I think you misread something? What you just gave is the definition of the term “source available.”

I’ll restate. My descriptivist definition of the term “open-source”, was that something is “open-source” if you are free to do at least one of either forking the thing for your own use, or modifying the thing and pushing those modifications upstream. In other words, “open-source” software is software where you’re free to notice a flaw in the program and, by some mechanism, get it fixed in such a way that other people can benefit from the fix.

And yes, the OSI definition of “Open Source” is an organization enforcing an arbitrary definition, because it disagrees with many uses of the term “open source” — specifically, the OSI considers GPL-licensed software to not be capital-letters “Open Source”, despite everyone conventionally considering it regular-adjective “open-source”. (The FSF does a similar brain-damaged thing with the term “Free Software”, which has not-much to do with what people would call “free software” — but at least “free software” isn’t a very common term in modern parlance; people aren’t constantly talking about “free software” with the FSF then misconstruing their words as if they had said “Free Software.” Which is exactly what the OSI does when people talk about “open-source software”, and then the OSI misconstrues their statements as statements about “Open Source software.”)

Yes, this is exactly why pedants use the term “FOSS” — i.e. “Free and Open Source Software”, a union-ing of the set of software that is FSF-jargon “Free Software” with the set of software that is OSI-jargon “Open Source Software.”

Regular people, who aren’t trying to be sycophants toward these two organizations, on the other hand, just use the uncapitalized adjective open-source to refer to this larger set.

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

#257

Post by fchall »

"Because open-source projects are directed by their contributors, there is a risk of hijacking by interest groups whose view of the future is not aligned with yours."

So true, as many projects have found out to their detriment in the last couple of years. Mathematica would be a juicy target for unproductive SJWs to take over.

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

#258

Post by deltaonefour »

"Free by side effect"

This is an important thing idealists need to realize. If someone contributes their time to code for free then something else must be paying for that time. Think about it, if a software engineer contributes 100% his time to open source and gets ZERO income in return... well he's eventually going to starve to death. It's unsustainable...

At Some point in this equation the software engineer must be coding for money and mostly nobody pays money for open source code. So whatever this software engineer is coding for money... likely it's closed source.

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

#259

Post by mark_l_watson »

After purchasing a one month subscription to Wolfram Language Desktop twice before, yesterday I paid for a one year subscription and decided to really explore the language, pre-trained models, and libraries.

The article didn’t come across well. They don’t need to justify being closed source.

What concerns me is that much of my hacking fun projects and also a lot of my work over the last 40 years has been in Common Lisp. I can take very old code that I have written and run it with several good open source systems and two fine closed source systems. I am sure the Wolfram company is not going anywhere, even if the founder is 60 (that is ten years younger than I am). But, if I were younger, could I be sure if being able to run my Wolfram Language code in 40 years? I don’t know.

The support for Wolfram Language is very good. I also pay much more that Wolfram for LispWorks Common Lisp (about $3500 to purchase and about another $600/year maintenance for support and upgrades). There is some pleasure in using well supported tools, and there is pleasure in using open source software. We get to decide individually what we want to use.

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

#260

Post by Semaphor »

derefr wrote: post #256
throwaway2048 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

approximately nobody defines open source as "you can see the source but you aren't free to fork it or modify it" This is not the conventional meaning of the term, and has repeatedly been used as an avenue to attack the concept in general. As a comparison, how happy would you be calling a system where you can only vote for candidates approved by a single leader a "Democracy". Under these standards, both the USSR and C…

I think you misread something? What you just gave is the definition of the term “source available.” I’ll restate. My descriptivist definition of the term “open-source”, was that something is “open-source” if you are free to do at least one of either forking the thing for your own use, or modifying the thing and pushing those modifications upstream. In other words, “open-source” software is software where you’re free…

> specifically, the OSI considers GPL-licensed software to not be capital-letters “Open Source”

What? OSI disagrees with you.

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