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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

#41

Post by ssivark »

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.

Honestly, it's time we all put our money where our mouths are. A hobbyist/individual license for Mathematica's desktop version is $170/year (or $335 for a forever license to the current version). If we really value our time, convenience and happiness, paying for software which we consider awesome should be a no-brainer. Heck, that's not even 1% of annual rent for someone living in the Bay Area. Of course, this comment is overly broad, and doesn't apply directly to people living in areas with lower cost of living or purchasing power (I grew up in India, so I understand the disparity).

I think Mathematica is quite fantastic (took me some time to understand it's patterns). I don't use it currently because 1) A lot of my current work is numerical and not symbolic -- for which Mathematica isn't great; so I use Python/Julia 2) From a long term perspective, I wouldn't want to invest a large fraction of my personal computing efforts into a proprietary single point of failure.

TBH, with regards to paying for software, my psychological motivation is still a work in progress (so the comments above are directed at myself as much as at others), but I'm trying to build a habit of doing it more -- especially to support free software. I care about computing too much -- I would hate to look back on this twenty years later and rue the loss of computing freedom because we were too stingy to invest a hundred bucks a year in the appropriate places.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#42

Post by peterburkimsher »

undecisive wrote: post #31

Feels like trolling to me. I suspect this was posted a day late. As he mentions, there are lots of projects that counter his claims. Linux kernel. Every Open Source high-level language ever. Red hat. Wolfram isn't open source because they don't want it to be open source. And you know what? They're allowed to do that! They don't need to justify that decision, it's their decision to make. Without resorting to "they lov…

They are allowed to make it closed-source, and there's no shame in making well-maintained commercial software. That's how business works.

What about when business fails though? Open-source projects never die; see the forks and reused knowledge in projects such as ffmpeg, libav, iPodLinux, Rockbox. For archiving purposes, open-source is tremendous.

I wish another kind of license were available, where software remains commercial until the company closes down, but then becomes OSS rather than abandonware.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#43

Post by hatmatrix »

mythz wrote: post #38

This is just a PR piece to justify to their customers why they're staying closed source. The obvious reason is that they'd make a lot less revenue if it were OSS/free. They're right that there's several business models around OSS that have negative side-effects and that just charging for software is the more transparent quid pro quo transaction. It's ok to sell software, but they should just be transparent about it.

I have no skin in the game, but I'll drop in my 2 cents. This may be a PR piece or someone who's had this conversation a countless number of times and wanted to lay it out in a single place.

The points seem mostly fair, though I would argue what he argues is "not possible" with an free or open source model is that it's "more difficult" to coordinate.

As an example, R is my go-to language, but the function arguments and style can be vastly different from function to function or package to package. Here I have found MATLAB to be more consistent in this regard. Python's kind of a mix - the core of Python is like one language and Numpy, Pandas another, but it does reflect the semi-independent management of these projects.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#44

Post by halirutan »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #42
undecisive wrote: post #31

Feels like trolling to me. I suspect this was posted a day late. As he mentions, there are lots of projects that counter his claims. Linux kernel. Every Open Source high-level language ever. Red hat. Wolfram isn't open source because they don't want it to be open source. And you know what? They're allowed to do that! They don't need to justify that decision, it's their decision to make. Without resorting to "they lov…

They are allowed to make it closed-source, and there's no shame in making well-maintained commercial software. That's how business works. What about when business fails though? Open-source projects never die; see the forks and reused knowledge in projects such as ffmpeg, libav, iPodLinux, Rockbox. For archiving purposes, open-source is tremendous. I wish another kind of license were available, where software remains…

Your last sentence reminded me of an interview with the Ton Rosendaal, the creator of Blender. He talks extensively about how Blender became OSS and not abandonware. I highly encourage to watch the whole interview (you need at least 5 mins to get used to his accent), but the important part starts around minute 14

https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#45

Post by tluyben2 »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #42
undecisive wrote: post #31

Feels like trolling to me. I suspect this was posted a day late. As he mentions, there are lots of projects that counter his claims. Linux kernel. Every Open Source high-level language ever. Red hat. Wolfram isn't open source because they don't want it to be open source. And you know what? They're allowed to do that! They don't need to justify that decision, it's their decision to make. Without resorting to "they lov…

They are allowed to make it closed-source, and there's no shame in making well-maintained commercial software. That's how business works. What about when business fails though? Open-source projects never die; see the forks and reused knowledge in projects such as ffmpeg, libav, iPodLinux, Rockbox. For archiving purposes, open-source is tremendous. I wish another kind of license were available, where software remains…

> Open-source projects never die

They do kind of die. Most of them, when the founder quits, the project just remains in github (etc) forever, not exactly dead but not alive either.

I am really in favor of companies that go out of business or products that quit open sourcing their software. I mean; all the popular Google products that were pulled, like Inbox, Rss reader and whatever more; why the hell didn't they open source those. I know ; probably something something legal, but that is a total waste.

I guess most companies, even after going out of business, will never do this.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#46

Post by tluyben2 »

I think control and making money are not bad reasons to keep something closed source. I would like to see products going open source when the product is discontinued or, something I have been thinking about, when you made enough money for past and future to fullfil goals. For Wolfram that seems a point reached years ago, but then again, Wolfram his goals are not clear for the future, so you don't know when that part is satisfied. So I see his point and think it's valid.

Like others have said here, if I were Wolfram, I would make it free for personal use and then price it depending on the company size and revenue (like some game engines do). I mean 345 euros for Home Edition is really too much imho; I understand the power and reach of the product, but wouldn't it be better to get more people dependent on it so they try to push it at their jobs/companies?

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#47

Post by wjnc »

ssivark wrote: post #41
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.

Honestly, it's time we all put our money where our mouths are. A hobbyist/individual license for Mathematica's desktop version is $170/year (or $335 for a forever license to the current version). If we really value our time, convenience and happiness, paying for software which we consider awesome should be a no-brainer. Heck, that's not even 1% of annual rent for someone living in the Bay Area. Of course, this commen…

Aren't there two seperate discussions? 1. Paying something for the contribution of others that offer their product for free (OSS) and 2. Paying for and using proprietary software according to the licenses as offered by the licensee. Mathematica falls under 2 and is obviously totally allowed to pursue any pricing scheme they find acceptable. We just happen to think that leads to a lower than optimal rate of acceptance, which is a societal loss but Wolframs good right. Given Wolframs love of I and there being two I's in prIcIng, he must have written about his motivations somewhere.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#48

Post by coldtea »

undecisive wrote: post #31

Feels like trolling to me. I suspect this was posted a day late. As he mentions, there are lots of projects that counter his claims. Linux kernel. Every Open Source high-level language ever. Red hat. Wolfram isn't open source because they don't want it to be open source. And you know what? They're allowed to do that! They don't need to justify that decision, it's their decision to make. Without resorting to "they lov…

His claims is not that Wolfram can't be Open Source (and be what it is).

He gives "12 reasons why [he] think[]s that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model".

I.e. his concern is not whether a project can be open sourced (and make money, or keep its vision, etc). Sure it can.

His concern is whether something like Wolfram can be built up the "bazaar" way, from a disparate open source community.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#49

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

How's that different from finding a routine (eg. one called GeoGraphics()), or JSX, or HTML/CSS for that matter?

You still need to know where to look, and you need to find the construct (routine, markup, builtin primitive, whatever) that does what you want.

The whole example is moot.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#50

Post by coldtea »

alexibm wrote: post #13

"fall madly in love!" with GAP (Computer Algebra System) "9.0 Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market". You have to have some balls to say that. Major mathematical libraries used in HPC are OSS.

>"9.0 Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market". You have to have some balls to say that. Major mathematical libraries used in HPC are OSS.

And most of them are copies of age old Fortran stuff. Linux itself is a UNIX clone. Gnome/KDE started as Windows clones. Where's the "tech innovation" in that?

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