> The tie-breaker is financial. It can be both financial and social: individual institutes are all too happy to pay for Mathematica licenses, and consequently

> The tie-breaker is financial. It can be both financial and social: individual institutes are all too happy to pay for Mathematica licenses, and consequently institute members can use it to produce reproducible research with it. However, the reproducibility of the resulting notebooks is drastically hindered by the fact that a reader essentially also needs to pay for Mathematica to get the full benefit out of these notebooks (even if they are readable without Mathematica). As a consequence, few people bother using it even though they can afford to. Social drivers disincentivise its usage. By a similar dynamic, Git beat out the competing DVCS: in this case mostly technical rather than financial factors that drove individual actors to prefer Git over alternatives (due, to a large part, to GitHub). But many people don’t actually care about technical considerations (or even prefer other systems over Git in this regard). What people most care about is seamless integration. In the end, a social driver caused Git’s adoption.