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Both are commercial software, have a low barrier to entry, are powerful enough to run the software for a nuclear power plant, have enough footguns to make this a terrible idea, and are so overused that it might be happening anyway.
But I do not think we will get rid of it any time soon.
What exactly is the boundary between commercial and non-commercial use? E.g. say you make an educational video that contains a portion of using Mathematica on RPI, and you could get ads income, is that indirect or direct commercial use? What if you use it to compute dimensions of some woodworking art piece that you sell later? What if you make a scientific or mathematical discovery thanks to it that you later use in…
The first boundary is "what Wolfram is willing to enforce".
The second boundary is "what a judge is willing to enforce".
Likely the 0th boundary will kick in before the other two. If too many people misuse this, Wolfram may decide it was a bad idea and end the program.
In practical terms, an overwhelming percentage of revenue comes from large institutions. Who have no incentive to steal the software.
IIRC, this has been the case for a while. I seem to recall getting a Raspberry Pi ~5 years ago which had Mathematica on it. Admittedly it was quite slow, but as far as I can recall it did work.
I use Mathematica frequently and, within the niche that it serves, it is starting to remind me a lot of Excel. Both are commercial software, have a low barrier to entry, are powerful enough to run the software for a nuclear power plant, have enough footguns to make this a terrible idea, and are so overused that it might be happening anyway. But I do not think we will get rid of it any time soon.
I feel about this the way I feel about "free" Windows when you buy a computer from a mainstream retailer. It's not worth the price, it's not a gift, it's just an adverstisement and a gateway to the walled garden. I have a normal Mathematica license and for the few times it's the right tool for the job I find myself reaching for something else anyway. I can almost always get things done with FOSS (usually within the p…
If you want examples of a walled garden, look at MacOS/iOS, Android (kind of), and arguably even the Linuxes (question of practicality).
I use Mathematica frequently and, within the niche that it serves, it is starting to remind me a lot of Excel. Both are commercial software, have a low barrier to entry, are powerful enough to run the software for a nuclear power plant, have enough footguns to make this a terrible idea, and are so overused that it might be happening anyway. But I do not think we will get rid of it any time soon.
Could you expand on, for a person who only dabbled with Mathematica some time back, what that niche is?
The old tactic of trying to get children hooked by making the first doses free.