It's me or a lot of those points don't explain anything?
I totally get they don't want to open source it as a company but don't try to give false reason for it.
It's not because it's open source that you can't have quality, central design, or good documentation.
It's not like anyone can push code to your project once you open source it, you're still the gatekeeper that decides which PR gets accepted and which one does not.
I could understand the argument that sifting through the pull requests would take them too much time that they could spend doing something else, but at least 8/12 of these could be solved by... you know, properly maintaining an open source project.
The article leads me to the conclusion that they have no intention of letting the community drive the company, and I could totally understand that. I don't see how any of the listed reasons could prevent them from making their code source-available without indicating an open source license.
Indeed. And what nonsense about cohesive design. There's nothing cohesive about the design of Wolfram functions and parameters. Often, they're not even documented!
Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.
Agreed. It definitely has its uses, but it lacks the self-consistency needed to be a language. Alot of this is for understandable historical reasons, but it has never been smoothed out as it would be in a project with more community involvement. Again that's ok.
Maybe we need something to be to mathematica as octave is to matlab.
Undocumented is not one of its problems: There are 10,000+ pages at http://reference.wolfram.com
Not just every function, but many arguments have their own pages - every import format, entity type, method. The problem is finding the right function.
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.
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 hearing the fees).
I dare say any financial organisation could replace the multilanguaged hell that is user built software by Mathematica and leap forward. It's the licensing cost that make Mathematica a niche product. Microsoft could buy Mathematica and integrate it with Excel (again, partly in jest).
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.
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.
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.
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.
An OS kernel is a bounded problem, it abstracts hardware, enforces some security constraints, and allows user programs to run. So it's not really that hard to have a consensus of what Linux should do.
Linux also has the (unique to it) idea that the kernel and the rest of the OS are not the same thing. There is no other integration point than the ABI for userspace.
And OTOH, Linux userspace is ridiculously de-centralized. There's competing distros, init systems, C runtimes, memory allocators, filesystems, etc.
And that's not even taking into account the absolute chaos of the Linux desktop.
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?
I own the book, and I enjoyed at least some parts of it. Primitive cellular automata classification also had some scientific merit, and now widely cited. It could be shorter and/or probably better structured as a series of blog posts, but it doesn’t deserve such vitriol, in my opinion.
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.
I remember this book + I own it. It is a very good book but way over my head. (Additionally, it serves well as a doorstop).
Still I admire the amount of diligence and energy that went into this. Wolfram spent several years _obsessed_ with this stuff. See his 2012 blogpost about his "quantified self" recordings: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti...
Maybe A New Kind of Science will create a surge sometime (just like Neural Networks were declared dead for several years, then Deep Learning came along and they took off)
"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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 libraries under the hood. Qt, in particular, is almost as old as Mathematica itself when the information on Wikipedia is correct.
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
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:
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.
If you look a bit over S.Wolfram’s posts, it looks like the Wolfram Language is just “what he decides based on his tastes and needs”. The syntax/options/quirks are manifold...
>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.
You are arguing against higher level abstractions. Absolutely nothing in your post is in anyway specifi to Mathematica. You could substitute the language and the api call to any other and have the same argument.
You're nitpicking, and you do need to "read the docs", or at least understand the language. Wolfram language is Lisp-like, and is fully symbolic. This allows some definitive programming, and Mathematica does take advantage of this.
Graphics in Mathematica is symbolic (according to the documentation). You can think of it as a Lisp-based vector graphics. It's still possible to manipulate pixel data extracted w/ "ImageData". It's just that "Image" object never allows direct pixel manipulation, which is the same in some other frameworks.
Also, "Style" is a function, not a block, that attaches styling information to its first argument. "Text" is a graphics primitive that provides placing information for text inside "Graphic". "GeoGraphic" is not neccessary here, and you can load map images with "GeoImage", and "Inset" them into graphics object. "GeoGraphics" is only good for rendering map-related data, like country borders, regions, roads, names, etc.
Wolfram language has its own patterns, and is pretty solid. Personally, I like it because it fully abuses its Lisp-like design, yet everything is curated by one single sane entity. I just dont want to endure a bunch of pretty hax0rs who never stop coming up with half-baked in-house solutions.
.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.
Totally right. And the copyright like Oracle does/did. However, the same applies to Wolfram Research. I do not disagree to them being closed source for e.g. monetarily reason, just for this argument of language control.
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 love money too much", I'll give them another, slightly more honest reason: It's certainly not impossible, but open sourcing an established project is hard. Managing a community of contributors AND a community of users is hard. Keeping a steady stream of revenue while you make the transition is haaaaarrrd. Maintaining all the values that he's mentioned while still keeping all your contributors and community happy: HARD.
And if the cost:value ratio is wrong, you don't do it. And if you have lots of other hard problems to solve, adding one more hard problem with fractional value is silly.
Yes, we would love it to be OSS. Maybe this was posted as a way of never having to answer the question again. Just sad that it isn't a little more honest an answer.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited." In other words, don't hold your breath for it to happen in the future - it doesn't fit with our vision.
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 the "FOSS development model" (what I call "bazaar-style" in my comment above).
Considering that he thinks that Wolfram couldn't be developed in the "FOSS development model", and that he things that model is not suited for Wolfram, it's also unlikely that he will open source it either. Since there's no much purpose in open sourcing something that doesn't benefit from that model. You just give your product away for free (beer/freedom) with no benefit for either the product or you.
Keep 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.
>Keep 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 think it does (equal "bazaar-style" development).
Else it's not a product with a "FOSS development model", but merely a product with a "FOSS license".
But he talks of "FOSS development model" (as opposed to "FOSS license" or "FOSS business model").
>Reusing my previous example, BSDs are shipped as operating systems, not a kernel and a hodge podge of packages.
For their core (kernel + userland) yes. But on top they are still as much "a hodge podge of packages", with uncoordinated development and releases as Linux (e.g. the desktop environments, applications, window managers, compilers, app servers, etc -- it's just the kernel and basic UNIX userland that's coherent in BSDs).
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.
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.
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?
Atleast they could include the source, with a paid purchase. Many software like vxworks will give you the source, which you can yourself rebuild, if you pay for a license. More commercial software should be bundling source code with paid licenses.
While using Mathematica, you don't need to go out to fetch some random 3rd party tools, because most components are already built into it. What makes it better is that combining those components is well streamlined, and there's little need for costly plumbing.
Paywall does suck, but someone gotta curate all those shits. Mathematica is a good platform not only because of some advanced algorithms built into it, but also because of the curation from Wolfram. Curating software component is one of the least fun job in the world, and any entities who do it properly should be paid for the sake longevity of their roles.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadIt's not because it's open source that you can't have quality, central design, or good documentation.
I could understand the argument that sifting through the pull requests would take them too much time that they could spend doing something else, but at least 8/12 of these could be solved by... you know, properly maintaining an open source project.
The article leads me to the conclusion that they have no intention of letting the community drive the company, and I could totally understand that. I don't see how any of the listed reasons could prevent them from making their code source-available without indicating an open source license.
I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?
Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.
Maybe we need something to be to mathematica as octave is to matlab.
That you haven't heard of it is perhaps telling.
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 hearing the fees).
I dare say any financial organisation could replace the multilanguaged hell that is user built software by Mathematica and leap forward. It's the licensing cost that make Mathematica a niche product. Microsoft could buy Mathematica and integrate it with Excel (again, partly in jest).
Out of curiosity, what did you do? Symbolic analysis?
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.
Mathematica is a brilliant product, and more people would use it if it was open source but it's ok that's it not.
Linux also has the (unique to it) idea that the kernel and the rest of the OS are not the same thing. There is no other integration point than the ABI for userspace.
And OTOH, Linux userspace is ridiculously de-centralized. There's competing distros, init systems, C runtimes, memory allocators, filesystems, etc.
And that's not even taking into account the absolute chaos of the Linux desktop.
Still I admire the amount of diligence and energy that went into this. Wolfram spent several years _obsessed_ with this stuff. See his 2012 blogpost about his "quantified self" recordings: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti...
Maybe A New Kind of Science will create a surge sometime (just like Neural Networks were declared dead for several years, then Deep Learning came along and they took off)
"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?
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.
But most of them are still copies of FreeBSD, Solaris, and Plan9 stuff. Something particularly innovative in Linux?
> 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.
Since neither of us included contact info in our profiles, commenting here instead of a PM. I stumbled across one of your prior comments.
All I want to say is I hope you're now doing well. Or least better.
I'll delete this reply in a few days, or after you acknowledge, which ever comes first.
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
ImageCompose[ Import["someworldimage.jpg"], Rasterize["Hello world" ]
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!
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.
In a product with an explicit owner, all you'd hear is "yes boss".
Is not that one want wolfram to be oss, one (me) wants a product with wolfram abilites and features, that you can grow, expand, correct, etc.
Graphics in Mathematica is symbolic (according to the documentation). You can think of it as a Lisp-based vector graphics. It's still possible to manipulate pixel data extracted w/ "ImageData". It's just that "Image" object never allows direct pixel manipulation, which is the same in some other frameworks.
Also, "Style" is a function, not a block, that attaches styling information to its first argument. "Text" is a graphics primitive that provides placing information for text inside "Graphic". "GeoGraphic" is not neccessary here, and you can load map images with "GeoImage", and "Inset" them into graphics object. "GeoGraphics" is only good for rendering map-related data, like country borders, regions, roads, names, etc.
Wolfram language has its own patterns, and is pretty solid. Personally, I like it because it fully abuses its Lisp-like design, yet everything is curated by one single sane entity. I just dont want to endure a bunch of pretty hax0rs who never stop coming up with half-baked in-house solutions.
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.
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.
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 love money too much", I'll give them another, slightly more honest reason: It's certainly not impossible, but open sourcing an established project is hard. Managing a community of contributors AND a community of users is hard. Keeping a steady stream of revenue while you make the transition is haaaaarrrd. Maintaining all the values that he's mentioned while still keeping all your contributors and community happy: HARD.
And if the cost:value ratio is wrong, you don't do it. And if you have lots of other hard problems to solve, adding one more hard problem with fractional value is silly.
Yes, we would love it to be OSS. Maybe this was posted as a way of never having to answer the question again. Just sad that it isn't a little more honest an answer.
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.
https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg
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.
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.
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 single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited." In other words, don't hold your breath for it to happen in the future - it doesn't fit with our vision.
His emphasis is that Wolfram was not, and in his opinion will never be, a good fit for the "FOSS development model" (what I call "bazaar-style" in my comment above).
Considering that he thinks that Wolfram couldn't be developed in the "FOSS development model", and that he things that model is not suited for Wolfram, it's also unlikely that he will open source it either. Since there's no much purpose in open sourcing something that doesn't benefit from that model. You just give your product away for free (beer/freedom) with no benefit for either the product or you.
I think it does (equal "bazaar-style" development).
Else it's not a product with a "FOSS development model", but merely a product with a "FOSS license".
But he talks of "FOSS development model" (as opposed to "FOSS license" or "FOSS business model").
>Reusing my previous example, BSDs are shipped as operating systems, not a kernel and a hodge podge of packages.
For their core (kernel + userland) yes. But on top they are still as much "a hodge podge of packages", with uncoordinated development and releases as Linux (e.g. the desktop environments, applications, window managers, compilers, app servers, etc -- it's just the kernel and basic UNIX userland that's coherent in BSDs).
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.
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.
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?
Quite literally, in this case.
Paywall does suck, but someone gotta curate all those shits. Mathematica is a good platform not only because of some advanced algorithms built into it, but also because of the curation from Wolfram. Curating software component is one of the least fun job in the world, and any entities who do it properly should be paid for the sake longevity of their roles.