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> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be

> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology? It’s not open source. Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful. Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he calls his entire enterprise now) must be proprietary and paid-for in order to exist. Maybe it’s true; all of the successful and wildly popular computer algebra systems are closed source. (wxMaxima is rough to use, Axiom has 3 or 4 different forks, each with fewer than 10 developers, SymPy just isn’t there, Sage is absolutely wonderful but not polished or easy to deploy, ...) But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. There is a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s. I think Wolfram needs to think quite hard about how he wants to get his technology in the hands of developers while maintaining a business. Not that my opinion matters, but if he can manage to do it by open sourcing Wolfram Language, Wolfram Engine, or something like that, while keeping his business intact, I might again consider him to be the genius he was lauded to be in his 20s.

pm90 7y ago
He won't change because society considers him to be a prodigy (for good reasons, see his early work) and he lives in a cloud of success from where its hard to empathize with how most developers or actual users of his tool work. In essence, he found great success with a business model for software appropriate for his time and has done well enough to not have to change anything. Although, perhaps this step is kind of a result of stagnating growth, IDK.
alain94040 7y ago
I don't care that it's not open source, it's a unique technology. Actual algorithms solving actual problems correctly. None of that fuzzy search that you'd get if you used Google. It's an amazing tool in its domain.
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  I absolutely don’t contend that it can’t do incredible things, and I think a huge swath of developers would be eager to take advantage of these capabilities were it under more permissive circumstances. I’m also happy for you that you have the latitude and willingness to build software in a programming language toolchain that is not under your control, both technologically and legally. I know at the companies I’ve worked for, including it as a part of the product would not fly with so many departments, most notably legal, exec leadership, and most SW developers. The reason for its dismissal goes a bit deeper than the simple fact that it’s not open source. We pay for other software (like E&M solvers), why not this? Because its use is not compartmentalized. It’s a programming language with the world’s most expansive standard library. Just as is the case with—say—Python, folks using this have no end to what they would build, including company IP. The code would absolutely not be portable, and your tech stack would be vendor-tied. That’s a danger zone for any serious enterprise.
- msla 7y ago
  My problem with it being closed-source is that it doesn't form a stable platform for my work. If they decide to change their product in incompatible ways in the future, I'm sunk. I have no recourse, I cannot fix the problem if it goes deep enough, and there are no other implementations. I learned this lesson (albeit from a distance) when Microsoft killed off Visual Basic 6 and replaced it with Visual Basic .Net.
  - angrygoat 7y ago
    I agree. Plus, you can't peer into the layers underneath your software – if I'm writing code in Python or R, everything underneath me is there for inspection, if needed. A closed source solution, where all you have is documentation (potentially flawed), including manually authored change information, just feels archaic at this point.
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      A lot of people use AWS though, right? It's about trust. Not trust in a "Amazon are good people I trust them" but more like "Amazon incentives are aligned with mine for this project, and I trust that using their platform wont f' me up down the line". Companies should derive that trust factor from other factors based on their unique circumstances. If you are Amazon's competitor for instance it is probably not wise to use AWS for anything, but if you are a startup it could be very wise to take a bit of lock-in to avoid rolling your own infrastructure. If you are an established company maybe use AWS but in a way that you could move to another provider without too much pain, but balance that against some of the goodies you get by staying locked in. I guess the same nuanced considerations have to be made to decide to use Wolfram Engine or not. There is no clear answer that suits all end users. I've been reading as much as I can on RMS's site recently because I want to expand my mind on these sorts of topics. I really want to understand how "free" software can work at a practical level, where you say "here is a piece of software, it's $1000 from me, and you are free to give it to your friends, modify it, and resell it, even to people who would have paid me $1000, but now they wont need to" and how that ties in with making a sustainable business. I think it takes some luck and good imagination to make such a business work by selling some by-product such as consulting services or whatever. But for a lot of companies non-free is required in my opinion to exist as a business. Happy to have my mind changed.
carry_bit 7y ago
Hopefully this is the first step in a series of steps to get there. Doing it in one big jump would probably impact revenue so much that it would take too long for them to grow out of it. Hopefully this change will increase their growth rate without much change to revenue, making it faster to grow out of, and prepare the way for further changes.
nisuni 7y ago
Do you use Google?
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  I don’t use Google as my programming language or standard library. (Of course, such a statement is nonsense.)
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    I have used Google as my programming language (Go) and a de-facto-standard library (Guava). Of course, in both cases they're open source. And I've found and fixed bugs when I couldn't get Google to do all of it themselves. And if Google ceased to exist both of these could continue with minimal interruption.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nisuni 7y ago
  You replied to a different question, and declared that question nonsense. My question is: do you use Google?
  - romantype 7y ago
    Yes. Now what's your point?
    - nisuni 7y ago
      At the question: "Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?" you replied "It’s not open source." It's two comments above this. No one asked about programming languages or standard library (except you when you misunderstood my question). Therefore you implied that a good reason not to use a technology is that it's not open source. Literally. Then why are you using Google?
      - 7y ago
juskrey 7y ago
This is bullshit. Most of the OSS is done by overbored corporate coders on good salaries, that is paid from the pockets of other successful businesses.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram" and so on and I can sort of understand why he might not want that to happen.
- slig 7y ago
  Can't they use a more restricted license that prevents that?
  - romantype 7y ago
    Which more restricted open source license would prevent that? There is none!
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      It can be done. If no license allows you to what you want, get your lawyer/s to draft one for you
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        Open source has a clear definition. The kind of license you want is not compatible with that. It would be a valid software license, but not open source.
        garmaine 7y ago
        I think you are conflating “free software” with “open source.”
        gmueckl 7y ago
        No. See https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
        7y ago
criley2 7y ago
>But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. Imagine saying this with a straight face. Maybe in web development, but the vast majority of programmers are using closed source tools to produce closed source software. You're either thinking of a tiny picture vs the whole picture (web devs vs programming in general) or you honestly have zero concept of what programming looks like outside of web apps.
- enriquto 7y ago
  In applied math, data science, statistics, the OP is right: free software is the norm.
  - nfoz 7y ago
    Really depends which niche you're in. Matlab for example is also a major player.
    - RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
      Not in production environments. Push is (as it should be) towards open source.
      - kgwgk 7y ago
        Mathworks' revenue is $1bn, it has doubled in the last decade. Someone may be using Matlab.
        Spivak 7y ago
        A ridiculously large number of people use Matlab as a tool. I can't think of a single engineer that doesn't curse its name regularly but I've yet to encounter any actual applications written in it. It's Excel for engineers.
        7y ago
jasonnyberg 7y ago
There is immense value in the amount of knowledge that they've curated and integrated into the system.
- enriquto 7y ago
  And it will be a shame that mankind loses this immense value once the company inevitably disappears.
ras_west 7y ago
>Most software is grounded in an open source That depends on the software development segment. If you are creating 3D games you would expect to build on top of Unity or Unreal because unless you are a major studio building the infrastructure yourself is expensive, slow and not as good. The question is "is computation" such a segment?
- billfruit 7y ago
  IIRC, I think Unity source is available if you purchase the appropriate license level, but Wolfram source is not available at all.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pokoleo 7y ago
At one time or another, I attended a talk given by wolfram and asked roughly the same question. His response belittled the question, calling it naive. His smugness was astoundingly tone deaf. Until he figures out how to answer questions like this without using shame to cow developers into line, I’m staying away.
- tinhb 7y ago
  he gave you nuggets of wisdom imo.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  Of course it is naive - his business is built around it. OpenSourcing takes a lot of revenue away from him. Compensating that with support contracts and cloud services won't be easy. Not to mention the fact that probably he doesn't own all rights for doing that. Software with such a history often contains third party licensed modules.
nikofeyn 7y ago
> But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. There is a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s. that is simply not true and a rather insular view. i build large complex systems, and all of it is done with proprietary software. in fact, it is practically impossible to do my job exclusively with open source software. most open source software is completely unreliable and ill-fitted for many domains. and just try getting good support for use cases only found in industrial use from most open source developers. i have tried, and it never works out. the response is usually "you figure it out and let us know". furthermore, a lot of proprietary software is fairly open source in that you get access to a fair amount of source code. and it isn't dwindling at all.
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I am claiming it’s uncommon to use closed source developer tools (compilers, interpreters, standard libraries, etc.). The mere fact that the most popular programming languages in the world are provided as open source implementations is a testament to that. There are some stragglers. I think K is closed source. Commercial implementations of APL are closed source but somewhat popular. “Source [partially] available” and “open source” are generally considered distinct concepts these days. See for instance [0] or even look up what Google’s dictionary says about the term. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
  - eps 7y ago
    Nearly all professional Windows development has been and still is done in Visual Studio. This alone makes your "uncommon" claim void, and there are other examples outside of the Windows ecosystem equally well-rooted in proprietory tools.
    - romantype 7y ago
      I have changed 7 jobs in 15 years so far and not once I have done Windows development in Visual Studio. Nor have I seen anyone in my company doing so. I would say Windows development in Visual Studio is by far uncommon when you compare with technologies like Python, C (with GCC or Clang), Java (OpenJDK), JavaScript, etc.
mundo 7y ago
> It’s not open source. WL is essentially just a bunch of useful functions collected into a common platform, and I think we already have the open source equivalent of that - it's called npm, and it's great, but it is very different, and it has some pretty big downsides which are the direct result of it being an open source project rather than a commercial product. I don't know if WL is as elegant or high-quality or deeply functional as Wolfram claims, but if it is, isn't that likely a result of it being built the way it's built? It might be that there's a middle option - a way to open some core part of the language, while still keeping enough closed to make up a service layer that they can charge for, as you described - but today's announcement is pretty strong evidence that they considered that and rejected it. It seems pretty presumptuous to assume they got it wrong.
- garmaine 7y ago
  There aren’t really any technical computing things done in JavaScript or hosted on npm, are there? A better analogy might be the scientific Python ecosystem.
brobdingnagians 7y ago
You seem to have an axe to grind. They have made a very nice ecosystem over the course of 30 years, they are opening it up more. They are proud of "how uniform, elegant and stable a design we’ve been able to maintain across the whole language." It is difficult to get that in an open source project and ecosystem. This has some marvelous qualities that come from its closed source nature. It is special because of that. Having both open source and closed source projects in the world complement each other. Use the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is to be closed source, sometimes open source. There are pros _and_ cons to _both_. I think it is great and applaud them for making such a nice tool, and now making it more widely available. Maybe it wouldn't be so great if it started out open source, or would be similar to open source things and not be distinct enough, so I'm grateful for what it is and what it is not.
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  No axe to grind. I’d like to think I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers. I don’t even want to make statements about open vs closed source generally. But as it pertains to developer tools (compilers, interpreters, debuggers, runtimes, standard libraries), open source has been hugely successful, hugely popular, and both individuals and corporations depend on that fact. You’re right, and I think I fairly painted a picture of Wolfram’s thesis about Mathematica being a commercial closed source product: He has the best general-purpose CAS on the market right now. That’s real value! But it’s not persuasive enough to spend my (or my employer’s) time, energy, and other resources into making it the source language of my (or my employer’s) product, IP, services, open source libraries, etc. Under discussion is a tool to write and run code in Wolfram Language, with a premise that providing the tool free of charge for use in a limited set of legal circumstances is useful. I argue that the legal framework around the usage of the tool is more consequential to its adoption and use than the cost. With that said, I don’t speak for everyone! If folks find this tool useful, love writing Wolfram code, have no expectations about the portability or maintainability of the code, trust Wolfram and the contract to which they’re agreeing, then by all means! More value for people is better!
  - brobdingnagians 7y ago
kluck 7y ago
Sort of Wolframs reply to why Wolfram is not open-source: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  This blog post conflates open source with a community development model.
  - kluck 7y ago
    I never know when they talk about "Wolfram" whether they mean the company or the person. And then I think what an egomaniac one must be in order to name an invention/creation after oneself.
    - ras_west 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_...
  - kluck 7y ago
    Their main worries with open-source seem to be: 1 Fear of losing control (over their vision and centralized design of computation and representation of the Wolfram language). This is just false, as they would be in control over their project even if open-sourced. Forks would be possible but would not influence the original source (if not wanted). 2 Fear of lack of innovation. I cannot see why this would be true. 3 Fear of ignorance towards hard/boring dev. topics. I see how that could be a problem. One solution would be funding (s. point below) to pay devs for the boring stuff. 4 Fear of lack of funding (because dev. costs money... surprise). Their main point (and probably a big issue of a lot of other companies thinking about open-sourcing their software) and a very valid one indeed. So I guess they just have not got a business modell ready involving open-sourcing their software. Wolfram seems not so much against open-source from a philosophical point of view but they clearly think they would not be able to fund their dev. efforts without their software revenue. @Wolfram: The most important assets of Wolfram are the devs. working there, not the software itself. Given this huge knowledge base around the topics covered by the Wolfram language, the support-business-modell could very well work! Also from a philosophical point of view: Wolfram claims to unify disparate fields of all of science which kind of is a scientific achievement on its own. Scientific results should be available for all people of our society.
jasonhansel 7y ago
Can someone make an OSS implementation? Doesn't seem impossible especially now that we have Truffle/Graal.
udqbpn 7y ago
There are some open source projects trying to implement some part of Wolfram Mathematica https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-there-an-open-source-implementation-of-mathematica-the-language https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-ther...
kaveh_h 7y ago
He should open source the Core language and then license all the extra functionality in paid for libraries. That would at least make it more possible to opt out the paid for functions or if you would like to have it opt in later.

pm90 7y ago

He won't change because society considers him to be a prodigy (for good reasons, see his early work) and he lives in a cloud of success from where its hard to empathize with how most developers or actual users of his tool work. In essence, he found great success with a business model for software appropriate for his time and has done well enough to not have to change anything. Although, perhaps this step is kind of a result of stagnating growth, IDK.

alain94040 7y ago

I don't care that it's not open source, it's a unique technology. Actual algorithms solving actual problems correctly. None of that fuzzy search that you'd get if you used Google. It's an amazing tool in its domain.

reikonomusha 7y ago
I absolutely don’t contend that it can’t do incredible things, and I think a huge swath of developers would be eager to take advantage of these capabilities were it under more permissive circumstances. I’m also happy for you that you have the latitude and willingness to build software in a programming language toolchain that is not under your control, both technologically and legally. I know at the companies I’ve worked for, including it as a part of the product would not fly with so many departments, most notably legal, exec leadership, and most SW developers. The reason for its dismissal goes a bit deeper than the simple fact that it’s not open source. We pay for other software (like E&M solvers), why not this? Because its use is not compartmentalized. It’s a programming language with the world’s most expansive standard library. Just as is the case with—say—Python, folks using this have no end to what they would build, including company IP. The code would absolutely not be portable, and your tech stack would be vendor-tied. That’s a danger zone for any serious enterprise.
msla 7y ago
My problem with it being closed-source is that it doesn't form a stable platform for my work. If they decide to change their product in incompatible ways in the future, I'm sunk. I have no recourse, I cannot fix the problem if it goes deep enough, and there are no other implementations. I learned this lesson (albeit from a distance) when Microsoft killed off Visual Basic 6 and replaced it with Visual Basic .Net.
- angrygoat 7y ago
  I agree. Plus, you can't peer into the layers underneath your software – if I'm writing code in Python or R, everything underneath me is there for inspection, if needed. A closed source solution, where all you have is documentation (potentially flawed), including manually authored change information, just feels archaic at this point.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    A lot of people use AWS though, right? It's about trust. Not trust in a "Amazon are good people I trust them" but more like "Amazon incentives are aligned with mine for this project, and I trust that using their platform wont f' me up down the line". Companies should derive that trust factor from other factors based on their unique circumstances. If you are Amazon's competitor for instance it is probably not wise to use AWS for anything, but if you are a startup it could be very wise to take a bit of lock-in to avoid rolling your own infrastructure. If you are an established company maybe use AWS but in a way that you could move to another provider without too much pain, but balance that against some of the goodies you get by staying locked in. I guess the same nuanced considerations have to be made to decide to use Wolfram Engine or not. There is no clear answer that suits all end users. I've been reading as much as I can on RMS's site recently because I want to expand my mind on these sorts of topics. I really want to understand how "free" software can work at a practical level, where you say "here is a piece of software, it's $1000 from me, and you are free to give it to your friends, modify it, and resell it, even to people who would have paid me $1000, but now they wont need to" and how that ties in with making a sustainable business. I think it takes some luck and good imagination to make such a business work by selling some by-product such as consulting services or whatever. But for a lot of companies non-free is required in my opinion to exist as a business. Happy to have my mind changed.

carry_bit 7y ago

Hopefully this is the first step in a series of steps to get there. Doing it in one big jump would probably impact revenue so much that it would take too long for them to grow out of it. Hopefully this change will increase their growth rate without much change to revenue, making it faster to grow out of, and prepare the way for further changes.

nisuni 7y ago

Do you use Google?

reikonomusha 7y ago
I don’t use Google as my programming language or standard library. (Of course, such a statement is nonsense.)
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  I have used Google as my programming language (Go) and a de-facto-standard library (Guava). Of course, in both cases they're open source. And I've found and fixed bugs when I couldn't get Google to do all of it themselves. And if Google ceased to exist both of these could continue with minimal interruption.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nisuni 7y ago
You replied to a different question, and declared that question nonsense. My question is: do you use Google?
- romantype 7y ago
  Yes. Now what's your point?
  - nisuni 7y ago
    At the question: "Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?" you replied "It’s not open source." It's two comments above this. No one asked about programming languages or standard library (except you when you misunderstood my question). Therefore you implied that a good reason not to use a technology is that it's not open source. Literally. Then why are you using Google?
    - 7y ago

juskrey 7y ago

This is bullshit. Most of the OSS is done by overbored corporate coders on good salaries, that is paid from the pockets of other successful businesses.

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago

If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram" and so on and I can sort of understand why he might not want that to happen.

slig 7y ago
Can't they use a more restricted license that prevents that?
- romantype 7y ago
  Which more restricted open source license would prevent that? There is none!
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    It can be done. If no license allows you to what you want, get your lawyer/s to draft one for you
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Open source has a clear definition. The kind of license you want is not compatible with that. It would be a valid software license, but not open source.
      - garmaine 7y ago
        I think you are conflating “free software” with “open source.”
        gmueckl 7y ago
        No. See https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
        7y ago

criley2 7y ago

>But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. Imagine saying this with a straight face. Maybe in web development, but the vast majority of programmers are using closed source tools to produce closed source software. You're either thinking of a tiny picture vs the whole picture (web devs vs programming in general) or you honestly have zero concept of what programming looks like outside of web apps.

enriquto 7y ago
In applied math, data science, statistics, the OP is right: free software is the norm.
- nfoz 7y ago
  Really depends which niche you're in. Matlab for example is also a major player.
  - RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
    Not in production environments. Push is (as it should be) towards open source.
    - kgwgk 7y ago
      Mathworks' revenue is $1bn, it has doubled in the last decade. Someone may be using Matlab.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        A ridiculously large number of people use Matlab as a tool. I can't think of a single engineer that doesn't curse its name regularly but I've yet to encounter any actual applications written in it. It's Excel for engineers.
        7y ago

jasonnyberg 7y ago

There is immense value in the amount of knowledge that they've curated and integrated into the system.

enriquto 7y ago
And it will be a shame that mankind loses this immense value once the company inevitably disappears.

ras_west 7y ago

>Most software is grounded in an open source That depends on the software development segment. If you are creating 3D games you would expect to build on top of Unity or Unreal because unless you are a major studio building the infrastructure yourself is expensive, slow and not as good. The question is "is computation" such a segment?

billfruit 7y ago
IIRC, I think Unity source is available if you purchase the appropriate license level, but Wolfram source is not available at all.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pokoleo 7y ago

At one time or another, I attended a talk given by wolfram and asked roughly the same question. His response belittled the question, calling it naive. His smugness was astoundingly tone deaf. Until he figures out how to answer questions like this without using shame to cow developers into line, I’m staying away.

tinhb 7y ago
he gave you nuggets of wisdom imo.
johannes1234321 7y ago
Of course it is naive - his business is built around it. OpenSourcing takes a lot of revenue away from him. Compensating that with support contracts and cloud services won't be easy. Not to mention the fact that probably he doesn't own all rights for doing that. Software with such a history often contains third party licensed modules.

nikofeyn 7y ago

> But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. There is a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s. that is simply not true and a rather insular view. i build large complex systems, and all of it is done with proprietary software. in fact, it is practically impossible to do my job exclusively with open source software. most open source software is completely unreliable and ill-fitted for many domains. and just try getting good support for use cases only found in industrial use from most open source developers. i have tried, and it never works out. the response is usually "you figure it out and let us know". furthermore, a lot of proprietary software is fairly open source in that you get access to a fair amount of source code. and it isn't dwindling at all.

reikonomusha 7y ago
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I am claiming it’s uncommon to use closed source developer tools (compilers, interpreters, standard libraries, etc.). The mere fact that the most popular programming languages in the world are provided as open source implementations is a testament to that. There are some stragglers. I think K is closed source. Commercial implementations of APL are closed source but somewhat popular. “Source [partially] available” and “open source” are generally considered distinct concepts these days. See for instance [0] or even look up what Google’s dictionary says about the term. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
- eps 7y ago
  Nearly all professional Windows development has been and still is done in Visual Studio. This alone makes your "uncommon" claim void, and there are other examples outside of the Windows ecosystem equally well-rooted in proprietory tools.
  - romantype 7y ago
    I have changed 7 jobs in 15 years so far and not once I have done Windows development in Visual Studio. Nor have I seen anyone in my company doing so. I would say Windows development in Visual Studio is by far uncommon when you compare with technologies like Python, C (with GCC or Clang), Java (OpenJDK), JavaScript, etc.

mundo 7y ago

> It’s not open source. WL is essentially just a bunch of useful functions collected into a common platform, and I think we already have the open source equivalent of that - it's called npm, and it's great, but it is very different, and it has some pretty big downsides which are the direct result of it being an open source project rather than a commercial product. I don't know if WL is as elegant or high-quality or deeply functional as Wolfram claims, but if it is, isn't that likely a result of it being built the way it's built? It might be that there's a middle option - a way to open some core part of the language, while still keeping enough closed to make up a service layer that they can charge for, as you described - but today's announcement is pretty strong evidence that they considered that and rejected it. It seems pretty presumptuous to assume they got it wrong.

garmaine 7y ago
There aren’t really any technical computing things done in JavaScript or hosted on npm, are there? A better analogy might be the scientific Python ecosystem.

brobdingnagians 7y ago

You seem to have an axe to grind. They have made a very nice ecosystem over the course of 30 years, they are opening it up more. They are proud of "how uniform, elegant and stable a design we’ve been able to maintain across the whole language." It is difficult to get that in an open source project and ecosystem. This has some marvelous qualities that come from its closed source nature. It is special because of that. Having both open source and closed source projects in the world complement each other. Use the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is to be closed source, sometimes open source. There are pros _and_ cons to _both_. I think it is great and applaud them for making such a nice tool, and now making it more widely available. Maybe it wouldn't be so great if it started out open source, or would be similar to open source things and not be distinct enough, so I'm grateful for what it is and what it is not.

reikonomusha 7y ago
No axe to grind. I’d like to think I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers. I don’t even want to make statements about open vs closed source generally. But as it pertains to developer tools (compilers, interpreters, debuggers, runtimes, standard libraries), open source has been hugely successful, hugely popular, and both individuals and corporations depend on that fact. You’re right, and I think I fairly painted a picture of Wolfram’s thesis about Mathematica being a commercial closed source product: He has the best general-purpose CAS on the market right now. That’s real value! But it’s not persuasive enough to spend my (or my employer’s) time, energy, and other resources into making it the source language of my (or my employer’s) product, IP, services, open source libraries, etc. Under discussion is a tool to write and run code in Wolfram Language, with a premise that providing the tool free of charge for use in a limited set of legal circumstances is useful. I argue that the legal framework around the usage of the tool is more consequential to its adoption and use than the cost. With that said, I don’t speak for everyone! If folks find this tool useful, love writing Wolfram code, have no expectations about the portability or maintainability of the code, trust Wolfram and the contract to which they’re agreeing, then by all means! More value for people is better!
- brobdingnagians 7y ago

kluck 7y ago

Sort of Wolframs reply to why Wolfram is not open-source: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...

reikonomusha 7y ago
This blog post conflates open source with a community development model.
- kluck 7y ago
  I never know when they talk about "Wolfram" whether they mean the company or the person. And then I think what an egomaniac one must be in order to name an invention/creation after oneself.
  - ras_west 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_...
- kluck 7y ago
  Their main worries with open-source seem to be: 1 Fear of losing control (over their vision and centralized design of computation and representation of the Wolfram language). This is just false, as they would be in control over their project even if open-sourced. Forks would be possible but would not influence the original source (if not wanted). 2 Fear of lack of innovation. I cannot see why this would be true. 3 Fear of ignorance towards hard/boring dev. topics. I see how that could be a problem. One solution would be funding (s. point below) to pay devs for the boring stuff. 4 Fear of lack of funding (because dev. costs money... surprise). Their main point (and probably a big issue of a lot of other companies thinking about open-sourcing their software) and a very valid one indeed. So I guess they just have not got a business modell ready involving open-sourcing their software. Wolfram seems not so much against open-source from a philosophical point of view but they clearly think they would not be able to fund their dev. efforts without their software revenue. @Wolfram: The most important assets of Wolfram are the devs. working there, not the software itself. Given this huge knowledge base around the topics covered by the Wolfram language, the support-business-modell could very well work! Also from a philosophical point of view: Wolfram claims to unify disparate fields of all of science which kind of is a scientific achievement on its own. Scientific results should be available for all people of our society.

jasonhansel 7y ago

Can someone make an OSS implementation? Doesn't seem impossible especially now that we have Truffle/Graal.

udqbpn 7y ago

There are some open source projects trying to implement some part of Wolfram Mathematica https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-there-an-open-source-implementation-of-mathematica-the-language https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-ther...

kaveh_h 7y ago

He should open source the Core language and then license all the extra functionality in paid for libraries. That would at least make it more possible to opt out the paid for functions or if you would like to have it opt in later.