Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I read that as a future-looking statement, justifying the past as an indicator of the future. Consider the statement "I don't think I could have survived if I was forced to cycle to work every day!" While I'm not saying it outright, I'm making it clear that tomorrow I will not be cycling to work. At the end, he almost does say it outright: "But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a si…
When he says ("But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited") is not that Wolfram can't be made open source nominally (e.g. "we make it, we control development completely, I call the shots, but it's just under GPL" for example). His emphasis is that Wolfram was not, and in his opinion will never be, a good fit for t…
Re: Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source
#71Keep in mind that "FOSS development model" does not equal "bazaar-style" development. Case in point: the *BSDs follow a more cathedral-style development model.
I fully agree with the author's first point ("A coherent vision requires centralized design"). Reusing my previous example, BSDs are shipped as operating systems, not a kernel and a hodge podge of packages. There's a bunch of things that are half assed on Linux distributions and I partially blame the bazaar style. It's not that it's a bad way to develop software, it's just that it's hard to make sense of the whole mess that comes with the bazaar.