Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

blog.wolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#51

Post by jpatokal »

codeulike wrote: post #32
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…

That's not really fair criticism. The Mathematica approach to things is very different to most other platforms. Have a look at some of the maths stuff and symbolic manipulation stuff, that's the core that it was built out from.

Sure, I'll buy that Mathematica has its niche in (surprise!) math, but that's very different from the friendly article's claim that Wolfram has a superior approach to, well, everything:

Wolfram’s vision for computation is much more profound—to unify and automate computation across computational fields, application areas, user types, interfaces and deployments.

They even mention blockchain further down!

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#53

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

coldtea wrote: post #50
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?

> Linux itself is a UNIX clone

I think Linux is a prime example of innovation. Yes, it first started as a UNIX clone, then basically took over and killed all competition, starting with x86 and then practically all other platforms, with very specific exceptions.

What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new technologies you can imagine in an operating system. And if some cool tech cannot be implemented in Linux for design reasons (e.g. a microkernel or a unikernel), a separate project is started.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#54

Post by coldtea »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #53
coldtea wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

> Linux itself is a UNIX clone I think Linux is a prime example of innovation. Yes, it first started as a UNIX clone, then basically took over and killed all competition, starting with x86 and then practically all other platforms, with very specific exceptions. What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new technologies you can imagine in an operating system. And if some cool tech cannot be impl…

>What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new technologies you can imagine in an operating system.

But most of them are still copies of FreeBSD, Solaris, and Plan9 stuff. Something particularly innovative in Linux?

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#56

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

coldtea wrote: post #54
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux itself is a UNIX clone I think Linux is a prime example of innovation. Yes, it first started as a UNIX clone, then basically took over and killed all competition, starting with x86 and then practically all other platforms, with very specific exceptions. What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new technologies you can imagine in an operating system. And if some cool tech cannot be impl…

> What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new technologies you can imagine in an operating system. But most of them are still copies of FreeBSD, Solaris, and Plan9 stuff. Something particularly innovative in Linux?

The article admits:

> Open source often does create ecosystems that encourage many small-scale innovations, but while bolder innovations do widely exist at the early experimental stages, they often fail to be refined to the point of usefulness in large-scale adoption.

You can argue that, for example, KVM is a clone of something else. However, it's because of not stopping at an early stage KVM is now a mature and insanely popular technology.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#57

Post by WkndTriathlete »

matt4077 wrote: post #22
thrillgore wrote: post #10

Does anyone remember his book "A New Kind of Science" which was a really discredited, unoriginal, hack-fraudish, non-scientifically vetted essay on cellular automata?

Still better than anything you or I will ever write.

Are you sure he wrote it? Rumor has it that Wolfram had his grad students/postdocs write Mathematica and is essentially trampling on their backs making money off of it now.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#58

Post by pilchardbreath »

halirutan wrote: post #39
timkam wrote: post #26

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.

I'm not even sure, why this blog post was necessary in the first place. No one argues that a company needs revenue to pay employees and WRI is trying to maximize its profit. That is absolutely fine. However, claiming that OSS cannot achieve great and well-designed software, just to cover the true reasons is simply wrong. Maybe someone should remind WRI that they use Qt, Cairo, Pango, OpenCV and many more OSS librarie…

He acknowledges that: "As I said at the start, the open-source model can work very well in smaller, self-contained subsets of computation where small teams can focus on local design issues. Indeed, the Wolfram Technology stack makes use of and contributes to a number of excellent open-source libraries for specialized tasks, such as..." and lists some

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#59

Post by anonlastname »

pilchardbreath wrote: post #40
anonlastname wrote: post #36

Interesting that money is not even on this list

Its on the list twice - 10 Paid software offers an open quid pro quo 11 It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D »

Those are not "because it allows us to get more profit." They are arguing that non-free Mathematica is completely in the best interest of their users. Of course it's not. At the end of the day, Sagemath is there for everybody to use and a person can't even use Mathematica unless they're connected to a university. They've sabotaged it with legal barriers and DRM.

Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

#60

Post by noblethrasher »

mythz wrote: post #29
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…

> or possibly Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing resources in maintaining a fork.

While they're not maintaining a fork, it's worth noting that the head of the ECMA C# standards committee is, in fact, a prominent Google employee.

Post reply on HN