19 ms·

Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source

91 points by halirutan 8y ago

eMerzh 8y ago
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.
- r3bl 8y ago
  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.
sigdigs 8y ago
1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community. I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?
- baud147258 8y ago
  nitpick: throes, not throws
- mimixco 8y ago
  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.
  - yummypaint 8y ago
    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.
    - Armisael16 8y ago
      https://www.maplesoft.com/compare/mathematica_analysis/ https://www.maplesoft.com/compare/mathematica_analysis/ That you haven't heard of it is perhaps telling.
      - carlob 8y ago
        Maple is not FOSS and is not a clone, Mathics is to Mathematica as octave is to Matlab.
  - pilchardbreath 8y ago
    Undocumented is not one of its problems: There are 10,000+ pages at http://reference.wolfram.com 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.
  - sigdigs 8y ago
    Not sure why my original comment was flagged. I suspect W's PR people have found this thread and started damage control.
wjnc 8y ago
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.
- atemerev 8y ago
  Well, there is a free tier in Wolfram Cloud, which shares the same language...
- HALtheWise 8y ago
  Mathematica is free on any Raspberry Pi.
  - wjnc 8y ago
    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).
    - rcarmo 8y ago
      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.
- iamcreasy 8y ago
  >multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe Out of curiosity, what did you do? Symbolic analysis?
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
Linux is an example of an open source project with centralized design & management and a unified vision. Mathematica is a brilliant product, and more people would use it if it was open source but it's ok that's it not.
- rhinoceraptor 8y ago
  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.
thrillgore 8y ago
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?
- atemerev 8y ago
  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.
- titanomachy 8y ago
  This blog post isn't by Stephen Wolfram, it's Jon McLoone.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Still better than anything you or I will ever write.
  - WkndTriathlete 8y ago
    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.
  - AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
    Wolfram is not some sort of demigod.
- knbknb 8y ago
  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-analytics-of-my-life/ 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)
alexibm 8y ago
"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.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >"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?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    > 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.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >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?
      - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
        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.
notfromhere 8y ago
tl;dr It's not open source because they like money
- sjfbo 8y ago
  Thank you, you saved some of my time.
Golfkid2Gadfly 8y ago
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.
qwerty456127 8y ago
It's because they want to sell if tor money. Not bad or good (although unreasonably expensive), just simple as this.
timkam 8y ago
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.
- halirutan 8y ago
  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.
  - pilchardbreath 8y ago
    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
jpatokal 8y ago
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 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 http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/GeoGraphics.htm
- pilchardbreath 8y ago
  Like WL... ImageCompose[ Import["someworldimage.jpg"], Rasterize["Hello world" ]
- codeulike 8y ago
  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.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    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!
- pfortuny 8y ago
  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...
oaiey 8y ago
.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.
- mythz 8y ago
  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.
  - noblethrasher 8y ago
    > 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.
    - oaiey 8y ago
      "prominent" ... What a modest description :)
  - oaiey 8y ago
    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.
undecisive 8y ago
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.
- peterburkimsher 8y ago
  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.
  - halirutan 8y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg
  - tluyben2 8y ago
anonlastname 8y ago
the answer is COLD HARD CASH MONEY!!! WE GOTTA GET PAID, Y'ALL!!! CHING CHING DOLLA DOLLA!!!! C.R.E.A.M!!!
anonlastname 8y ago
Interesting that money is not even on this list
- pilchardbreath 8y ago
  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 »
  - anonlastname 8y ago
    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.
mythz 8y ago
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.
- hatmatrix 8y ago
  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.
tluyben2 8y ago
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?
m0zg 8y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair Quite literally, in this case.
billfruit 8y ago
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.
esjeon 8y ago
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.

91 points by halirutan 8y ago

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.

r3bl 8y ago
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.

sigdigs 8y ago

1. No-one asked for wolfram to explain why they aren't open source. 2. It's basically a slap in the face to the FOSS community. I think it's just part of the angry death throws of a dying company. With sympy, mathics, sage, etc - why use mathematica?

baud147258 8y ago
nitpick: throes, not throws
mimixco 8y ago
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.
- yummypaint 8y ago
  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.
  - Armisael16 8y ago
    https://www.maplesoft.com/compare/mathematica_analysis/ https://www.maplesoft.com/compare/mathematica_analysis/ That you haven't heard of it is perhaps telling.
    - carlob 8y ago
      Maple is not FOSS and is not a clone, Mathics is to Mathematica as octave is to Matlab.
- pilchardbreath 8y ago
  Undocumented is not one of its problems: There are 10,000+ pages at http://reference.wolfram.com 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.
- sigdigs 8y ago
  Not sure why my original comment was flagged. I suspect W's PR people have found this thread and started damage control.

wjnc 8y ago

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.

atemerev 8y ago
Well, there is a free tier in Wolfram Cloud, which shares the same language...
HALtheWise 8y ago
Mathematica is free on any Raspberry Pi.
- wjnc 8y ago
  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).
  - rcarmo 8y ago
    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.
iamcreasy 8y ago
>multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe Out of curiosity, what did you do? Symbolic analysis?

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

Linux is an example of an open source project with centralized design & management and a unified vision. Mathematica is a brilliant product, and more people would use it if it was open source but it's ok that's it not.

rhinoceraptor 8y ago
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.

thrillgore 8y ago

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?

atemerev 8y ago
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.
titanomachy 8y ago
This blog post isn't by Stephen Wolfram, it's Jon McLoone.
matt4077 8y ago
Still better than anything you or I will ever write.
- WkndTriathlete 8y ago
  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.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  Wolfram is not some sort of demigod.
knbknb 8y ago
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-analytics-of-my-life/ 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)

alexibm 8y ago

"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.

coldtea 8y ago
>"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?
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  > 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.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >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?
    - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      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.

notfromhere 8y ago

tl;dr It's not open source because they like money

sjfbo 8y ago
Thank you, you saved some of my time.

Golfkid2Gadfly 8y ago

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.

qwerty456127 8y ago

It's because they want to sell if tor money. Not bad or good (although unreasonably expensive), just simple as this.

timkam 8y ago

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.

halirutan 8y ago
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.
- pilchardbreath 8y ago
  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

jpatokal 8y ago

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 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 http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/GeoGraphics.htm

pilchardbreath 8y ago
Like WL... ImageCompose[ Import["someworldimage.jpg"], Rasterize["Hello world" ]
codeulike 8y ago
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.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  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!
pfortuny 8y ago
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...

oaiey 8y ago

.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.

mythz 8y ago
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.
- noblethrasher 8y ago
  > 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.
  - oaiey 8y ago
    "prominent" ... What a modest description :)
- oaiey 8y ago
  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.

undecisive 8y ago

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.

peterburkimsher 8y ago
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.
- halirutan 8y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg
- tluyben2 8y ago

anonlastname 8y ago

the answer is COLD HARD CASH MONEY!!! WE GOTTA GET PAID, Y'ALL!!! CHING CHING DOLLA DOLLA!!!! C.R.E.A.M!!!

anonlastname 8y ago

Interesting that money is not even on this list

pilchardbreath 8y ago
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 »
- anonlastname 8y ago
  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.

mythz 8y ago

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.

hatmatrix 8y ago
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.

tluyben2 8y ago

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?

m0zg 8y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair Quite literally, in this case.

billfruit 8y ago

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.

esjeon 8y ago

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.