I'm sure there are people in the past that wanted Windoze to become "open" (whatever that means, you don't specify in your argument). But Windoze is neither ope

I'm sure there are people in the past that wanted Windoze to become "open" (whatever that means, you don't specify in your argument). But Windoze is neither open nor gone. You're forgetting the third and much more realistic option: that people will come together and create a substitute that far surpasses the original, because of the naturally collaborative nature of free software. Wolfram the computational engine is a hosted solution, so there's very little point to "opening" that, business continuity reasons aside. Mathematica I don't know much about, but afaik serious engineers, mathematicians and physicists use MATLAB generally. There's more of a shift to using R and Julia nowadays but academics are notoriously stubborn when it comes to using software, regardless of its quality.