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Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#21

Post by s9w »

wjnc wrote: post #5

For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.

Same experience here. Mathematica is incredibly powerful. Manipulate[] is so far ahead of anything else alone. Plus the symbolic math, the insane amount of built-in functions, the stunning visualizations... But the pricing is insane. Not in a thousand years would it be possible to afford Mathematica professionally or as a hobby. I had great fun with my student license for a year though.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#23

Post by rcarmo »

wjnc wrote: post #19
HALtheWise wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematica is free on any Raspberry Pi.

I know. There's quite the lack of computing power on the RPi though for professional use. And thus no use in investing the time in learning Mathematica. (The BOFHs would fall over laughing if you tried to bring a RPi for BYOD.) My point was to combine a compliment (it's a truly awesome set of tools) with a gripe (the pricing is so prohibitive, even decision makers in pretty cost-oblivious organisations cringe when he…

The new Pi 3+ revisions are... adequate if you’re a hobbyist. I have used Mathematica on and off since the NeXT era, and still play around with it whenever I want to get a feel for some new concept or revisit old materials.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#24

Post by Golfkid2Gadfly »

Because, open source is more about intellectual property rights, than about architecture and control. From the outside looking in, it appears that you have made some decisions made on some bad assumptions of what open source software has to be. I could argue your points one by one, but I think it’s more important to address the key factor here: The market is inherently distrustful of closed technology systems.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#26

Post by timkam »

Isn't the blog post facilitating the types of open vs. closed source discussions we should stop having as a community? Very little (or nothing) of what McLoone introduces as "reasons" cannot be achieved with an OS approach. In the end, it's a business choice someone has made a long time ago and McLoone is now arguing backwards.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#27

Post by jpatokal »

The very concept of unified computation has been largely led by Wolfram.

For "unified", try sandboxed, walled harden or evolutionary dead end. Just look at this literal Hello World example:

GeoGraphics[Text[Style["Hello!", 150]], GeoRange -> World]

In any other language, if I wanted to write some text on a graphic, I would find a routine to load an image into memory and another to render text into that memory. That's genuinely easy.

But in Wolfram's case, I'm apparently just supposed to know that there's something called "GeoGraphics" that does this kind of thing, that the text goes in a Style[] block (what?), and "GeoRange -> World" is how you tell it to create a worldmap as a background. WTF. And don't tell me "read the docs", because even if I found this, it wouldn't help me much with the rest:

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/GeoGraphics.htm

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#28

Post by oaiey »

.NET and the languages C# and VisualBasic.NET are open source (definitely not free software) but tightly developed by one central R&D. I find the second argument especially weak. You can be completely open source (and probably even free) without giving up any control over your distribution.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#29

Post by mythz »

oaiey wrote: post #28

.NET and the languages C# and VisualBasic.NET are open source (definitely not free software) but tightly developed by one central R&D. I find the second argument especially weak. You can be completely open source (and probably even free) without giving up any control over your distribution.

They're only central R&D because MS employ most of the paid dev resources working on it and no one would use any forks except from MS (or possibly Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing resources in maintaining a fork) so there's no risk of fragmentation.

That definitely doesn't apply to all projects, you can look at the successful forks of Oracle's OSS acquired products.

If the OSS'ed code-base is valuable, you've just given a open invitation to all your competitors to create their own competing forks.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#30

Post by pilchardbreath »

jpatokal wrote: post #27

The very concept of unified computation has been largely led by Wolfram. For "unified", try sandboxed, walled harden or evolutionary dead end. Just look at this literal Hello World example: GeoGraphics[Text[Style["Hello!", 150]], GeoRange -> World] In any other language, if I wanted to write some text on a graphic, I would find a routine to load an image into memory and another to render text into that memory. That's…

Like WL...

ImageCompose[ Import["someworldimage.jpg"], Rasterize["Hello world" ]

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