Some 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

Some 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.