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The thing is, looking at that list... most of it actually seems reasonable to me. Quality software costs money, and that money comes from somewhere. The proble
by cwyers 8y ago
The thing is, looking at that list... most of it actually seems reasonable to me. Quality software costs money, and that money comes from somewhere.
The problem is network effects. The blog post is right that if you are running a large deployment of things like R or Python, you are likely paying vendors and getting support contracts and all these things so that it's not really free-as-in-beer to you. But there are a lot of people not yet at that scale where it is free as in beer to them. An ecosystem based around R or Python has a lot of people who can't afford to pay for Mathematica. Those people are writing blog posts, or answering Stack Overflow questions. If I've just come up with a novel technique and I want to get it out there (either as someone in academia or elsewhere), my broadest reach is going to be to release R or Python code. Everyone with Mathematica can install R if they're curious, people who use R can't just install Mathematica on a whim to look at one research paper. If I'm an employee at a small company that is using Excel for analysis still, it's really easy to smuggle in R or Python and do an ad hoc pilot project that gets adopted, whereas it'll take me six months to get Mathematica through the approval process, and they'll probably tell me no.
So more packages get written for the open source ecosystems, more documentation gets written, I can share my work with more people. Even if R and Python are in every other way worse than Mathematica, over time, the network effects will drive more and more people to R and Python.
- brianpgordon 8y agoSome of that list looks reasonable to me (mainly what you pointed out, that software development costs money), but there's a heaping dose of old-Microsoft-style FUD about open-source ("Because open-source projects are directed by their contributors, there is a risk of hijacking by interest groups whose view of the future is not aligned with yours") mixed in there too. The core argument, though, seems to be that the Wolfram Language is a special case and could never be built in any other way because it would be too hard. I don't buy it. Everyone thinks their own thing is a special case, and it rarely is. Contrary to his argument, the core language doesn't really need to be informed by subject matter expertise in graph algorithms or machine learning or whatever. They're really just libraries, no matter what he says. And it doesn't really require that extraordinary a leap to have some core types like points and intervals and curves that are shared across the system, without fragmenting. His arguments are just not that convincing to me.
- patrec 8y agoI don't think wolfram is a special case, it's just a complex end-user product that's polished and innovative. I struggle to think of open source end-user product that has: - technical innovation - polished UI/UX/documentation - a problem domain of moderate to high complexity Can you name any?
- brianpgordon 8y agoChrome, IntelliJ, Blender, RHEL, AOSP. Anyway, if he had restricted his argument to "polished software is hard with an open source business model" then I wouldn't be posting an unimpressed comment. Instead, the argument centers around Mathematica being a special case.