Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

Are they that close now to be often interchangeable? Last I looked, they were as different as Lisp is to C: Mathematica is very strong for symbolic manipulation and discrete simulations and DSLs and can somewhat do numerics, whereas Matlab can get you serious performance in numerics but at the cost of awfully inflexible language.

my point was you can get any rules if you cherry pick examples ...

I'm ... not a fan of "library management".

1) I see its value. The cacophony needs to be tamed. And a larger company can dedicate staff to keeping the library up-to-date and organized.

But it's kind of like the problems between a monorepo and multiple repositories.

I've never been part of a company where we could afford to dedicate people to BOM management and library control. I know a really good person who does this--but the companies she works at move at a sclerotic pace. They're medical or aerospace. They have zillions of ISO certifications and testing requirements. You have to file 3 forms to put a new part in the "system". And this is fine--I want someone like her preventing random changes sneaking into a medical device, thanks.

And even still, she has to fight with people every day to hold back the chaos.

2) Everybody has a different notion of "library management" and someone else's version will always be an impediment.

"Library management" is, practically by definition, opinionated. Mine is too.

I have a very idiosyncratic way of parts numbering my resistors, capacitors, inductors and a few other things in the system. It's optimized for the fact that if you put things in boxes in order sorted by those numbers, I can browse through our inventory very quickly and pull parts, values, and footprints that I need as well as know if I don't have something or have a substitute. All without having to consult some master spreadsheet or database that will always be out of date.

It drives the aforementioned library organizer crazy. She wants me to use the "standard" parts numbers and classifications. However, she also acknowledges that I have a solid reason for what I chose. If I ever manage to hire her, I will let her at it and I will comply with what she wants.

> "manually match symbols to footprints" was its approach to library management :/

It is, but I also find that "footprint management" at the schematic simply isn't as useful as people make it out to be. "Generic" footprints are fine when you're throwing around DIP chips or 1206 components. However, footprints get a lot less "generic" and interchangeable when you're working with 0402 and smaller components.

A lot of my components wind up with "unique" footprints anyway.

> You can see the term gaining popularity prior to 3 Feb 1998

“Open source” has older non-software uses, most notably in the intelligence context, where it picks up sharply in the 1980s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source+in...

What a jackhole!

A study in basically why open source works and is always better - than crappy corporations that would write a blog like this.

1. "A coherent vision requires centralized design" - BULLSHIT! you can do open source with a centralized or whatever kind of governance you want.

2. "High-level languages need more design than low-level languages" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! maybe true, but who said open source can't handle the "more" design required? I can't think of a single open source design with, say 30 million lines of code, that is "designed" ok.

3. "You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields" - BULLSHIT! so, open source is never ever multidisiplinary? from disparate fields? This is EXACTLY why it should be open! How do you even presume to do this by excluding all the diverse stakeholders?

4. "Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too" - BULLSHIT! the only thing harder than getting some dedicated guy working for free doing the hard boring stuff, is to get your management to allocate schedule and budget for it.

5. "Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! so unilateral corporate decisions are never bad? And open source necessarily means crowd-sourced governance? And even if the decisions are sometimes bad, couldn't they also more often be good?

6. "Our developers work for you, not just themselves" - TOTAL BULLSHIT! they 100% work for YOU not me. I'd love to help. For free! but I can't because a) I don't work for you and b) if I did, you wouldn't let me do what I want.

7. "Unified computation requires unified design" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! so.. open source can never create a unified design? You could literally change nothing in your governance structure, publish your source, and it'd be exactly as unified (whatever that means) as it already is. But by magic, open sourceness means that the contributors are incapable of creating a unified vision?

8. "Unified representation requires unified design" - BULLSHIT LAZY COPY OF PREVIOUS ARGUMENT!

9. "Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market" - BULLSHIT! WHAT! inovation has always been linked to coloboration and sharing. You can't inovate in an echo chamber. Yes, right, you go on paying your developers to inovate on a fixed schedule and budget...

10. "Paid software offers an open quid pro quo" - LYING BULLSHIT! like because the open-ness of open software is so sneaky that even when it tells you exactly what you get, you can't be sure. And definitely corporate license agreements bring 100% clarity and performance guarantees.

11. "It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D" - Yes!!! and that is why companies should exist. Open source does not mean that wolfram won't sell licenses and make money $$$. In fact, the author has already assured us that wolfram developers are the best, the most unified, hard-boring-working, coherent, inovative people to be found. So regardless of the sourcing, they'd be dominant in the market, right? So what's the problem?

12. "Bad design is expensive" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! Soooo... open source == bad design and you == good design? ya... And designs hidden behind a closed source wall are never, ever bad, right?