23 ms·

Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

246 points by AJRF 5y ago

streamofdigits 5y ago
at this point the ecological niche of open source computation / algorithmic stacks is so well occupied that even if wolfram were to open source their code (as an attempt to remain relevant?), it is unlikely it would change much in the landscape?
killjoywashere 5y ago
Who are Wolfram’s customers? I recall back in 1993 a girl I knew did an internship at Black and Veatch and she enjoyed it, but is B&V really the target market? If so, I don’t see how “math” is the major draw.
- rwmj 5y ago
  Lots of universities and similar research/educational institutes have site licenses.
pmarreck 5y ago
There's been a slow but noticeable march of open-source things replacing closed-source things over time. [Open source] software will eat the world, and all that
bborud 5y ago
It would be more interesting to address why they chose a pricing model that guaranteed their products would never be a more mainstream consumer product and pretty much irrelevant for almost all enterprise contexts where a computational or analytical capability is needed. Because I don't think they are so stupid this wasn't a conscious decision on their part.
- ozim 5y ago
  I don't really know but lets play their advocate. Probably they are stuck in academia market or really research market because that is who they know and this is their target audience. Moving to more enterprise context would cost them effort, they would have to hire enterprise sales people and spend money on making new connections. Then to gain real foothold they would have to implement security/auditing/SSO and other enterprise requirements. Which would be quite heavy investment and quite high risk one, because they will never know if any of it will be useful. Like they get first customer, roll out all of that and then growth stagnates and maybe they are stuck on 2-3 customers who keep making demands, but there is no growth to cover for the "enterprise features" investments. Keep in mind also that not everyone wants to be a unicorn, if they are happy with what they have and roll with it, it is also fine.
- analog31 5y ago
  I think to make it mainstream would require making it different. The number of people who actually have a use for Mathematica is pretty small. Very few people understand both math and programming. Most people who can program are already employed as programmers. In a larger organization, rather than buying 10 licenses for 200 bucks each, it's better to buy 1 license for 2000 bucks and have everybody bring their math work to the "math person." Organizations see this as a natural division of labor. And it's easy to justify that cost because you can show that the math person is using Mathematica full time. They would have to add more non-programming and non-math features. And at the end of the day, they'd still be competing with free. In my own case, I've used Mathematica, and I love it. But the standard arguments in favor of using free tools have all materialized over the span of my career, and I'm happy enough with Python.
  - bborud 5y ago
    Well, let's for arguments sake consider the most important demographic in my mind: me :-). (That's what most people do anyway). Joking aside. I'd love to make Mathematica part of my toolbox, but the steep pricing makes me think about all the other software I pay license fees on that I depend on, and I need another software expense like I need a third buttock. If it wasn't a recurring license, or a recurring license at a significantly lowered price, that would make it different.
    - analog31 5y ago
      Indeed, in my case, I've got my basic toolchain installed on more than a half dozen computers. At work, I do hardware related R&D, so I need my tools at multiple workstations in the lab. At home, a work-at-home computer and a personal computer. If I share something, my victims need to install their own copy of the tools. Then there's the whole world of code running on microcontrollers, which is how I prototype hardware gadgets, also in multiple locations. There is one piece of domain specific software that I use, and that is tied to a single computer, but I only use it sporadically when I need to do that particular kind of design work. I appreciate Wolfram's vision for a universal computing platform, but aside from the problem of getting everybody to agree on what that should look like, it's not a realistic dream unless it addresses things like economics and logistics.
- idanman 5y ago
  Not sure about that. If Matlab is their main competition, then they are much cheaper and you get tons more (that you may never use but its there...) for the price of just Matlab's base software. The downside is that the engineering community by and large uses Matlab because it's what the legacy code is and it is taught in school. I've used Mathematica and I enjoy using it (and Python) more than Matlab but at the end I have to use Matlab because that's what my colleagues use.
  - ansgri 5y ago
    Are they that close now to be often interchangeable? Last I looked, they were as different as Lisp is to C: Mathematica is very strong for symbolic manipulation and discrete simulations and DSLs and can somewhat do numerics, whereas Matlab can get you serious performance in numerics but at the cost of awfully inflexible language.
- kylehotchkiss 5y ago
  Wolfram’s suite of software seems like it’d require very specialized support staff. Maybe the higher price point helps keep the customer support side of the business more maintainable?
TheDesolate0 5y ago
Mr Crabs: MONEY!
User23 5y ago
I understand Mr. Wolfram's decision to be a billionaire with a small army of brilliant persons at his beck and call. I also understand his desire to keep complete control of what he's built. All that being said, I sincerely hope he makes provisions to make his work Free at some point after his death. Because, if he doesn't, lacking his admittedly ingenius leadership, it will be lost to obscurity at best. That would be a shame for humanity.
- bgandrew 5y ago
  don't be too negative, there are lots of alternatives. humanity will lose almost nothing if wolfram cease to exists.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Most of these are about wanting control over the design of the software - but releasing their code doesn't have any impact on that - I don't get it? Java is open source - Oracle still tightly controls and manages the design of Java. For example 'Bad design is expensive' - how releasing your source lead to bad design? That's a complete non-sequitur.
- chubot 5y ago
  They are arguing it does have impact on that. The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success. So I think it's realistic to at least engage with their argument seriously rather than dismiss it. The argument is that open source licenses are incompatible with the kind paid license they're offering their customers. These licenses pay for the salary of their skilled employees. Oracle makes money EXACTLY the same way -- by selling commercial licenses to a non-open-source database. That's why Java can be open source and not bankrupt the company. Again, the argument here seems to be Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay for Wolfram ! ----- edit: Since this comment is highly upvoted and visible, I'll mention that I'm seeking funding for a compiler engineer for the Oil shell, which I just mentioned on the blog: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#more-ways-to-cut-scope http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#mor... So I know from over 5 years of direct personal experience that compiler engineers don't just show up to your open source project and start implementing things! Even if you have tens of thousands of readers on Hacker News for years. (Oil has had 48 contributors but not very consistently, which is understandable.) To be clear, I did not expect help! I have asked for it, but I thought I would be able to finish it myself. So it looks like hiring someone with specialized skills is the most realistic way to accelerate the project (now that the language design is in good shape). This funding is to finish the Python to C++ translation, which is already half done. Example: Oil's Parser is 160x to 200x Faster Than It Was 2 Years Ago http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html (lots of progress since then) I'm applying for 50K euros of funding from NLNet. Also in the process of setting up Github Sponsors. E-mail me at andy@oilshell.org if you want to make a donation -- I think I will need at least $250K to properly pay for this position. If you're a professional programmer and spend 2 hours fussing with a shell script, that's probably worth a few hundreds dollars. I'll start mentioning this in more posts when everything is set up, but I thought I would use this extremely relevant topic to raise awareness. Programming languages don't pay for themselves! https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/oil-language-tour.html https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/oil-language-tou...
rp1 5y ago
Almost none of the reasons have anything to do with releasing the source. You can release the source but still maintain central control. They shouldn’t even have posted this. Obviously they want to make money from their products, and that’s fine.
- deleted 5y ago
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- foxfluff 5y ago
  Yea, it's embarrassingly bad. It sounds like their idea of open source is something along the lines of "slap a MIT license on it, throw it over fence, and hope random nerds on the internet finish it while we wait idly."
  - rob_c 5y ago
    Well the guy seems like a VP in corporate, probably would struggle with more than hello world himself...
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      I think it's far more likely that he is a better computer scientist, and a better programmer, than the vast majority of people you or I know.
      - rhapsodic 5y ago
        >I think it's far more likely that he is a better computer scientist, and a better programmer, than the vast majority of people you or I know. There's a lot of information about Jon McLoone available online (personal website, linkedin, etc.), but aside from his degree in Mathematics and a long association with Wolfram (in what appear to be primarily non-technical roles), I couldn't find anything that supports your statement. I'm not saying it's not out there, just that I couldn't find it.
- cycomanic 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
Most of their points are valid for community driven open source projects but the existence of large corporate ones like Chrome, Android, .net, VS Code, Tensorflow and lots more prove that exerting tight central control while being fully open source is very much possible.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  I mean, also Blender (written in pure C, Python scripting for UI). Pretty sure it's as complex as Wolfram at that point. Largely financed by private corporations now, still open source. The irony is that Blender USED to be a proprietary project, the community had to buy back the source code.
- chubot 5y ago
  This seems too obvious to repeat, but Google and Microsoft fund Chrome and VS Code through the profits from their other products like Search and Windows. Wolfram doesn't have that, and most businesses don't. It's very easy for us say "just make it open source" if we don't have to come up with a way of paying people! Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay for Wolfram !
  - jayd16 5y ago
    That's fine. The bullets should just read "we can't figure out a FOSS business model" instead of calling it a code quality problem.
    - mountainriver 5y ago
      Exactly I’ve been building OSS for companies for a long time now, it’s an incredibly viable business model as shown by the boatload of products that do it today
  - analognoise 5y ago
    Exactly this. Oh just be a world beating, industry leading, technical titan of a company with multiple revenue streams and you can afford to give away some code to make us all happy. Wolfram just has to launch an operating system, a search engine, a line of mobile phones and laptops, a cloud services unit, and sure then they'll give away Mathematica, what the hell why not?
VHRanger 5y ago
1 - 11: $$ 12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  At first I thought, "how could anything be slower than python?" And then I figured that you probably would've ported it to leverage things like numpy which makes a lot of operations into native code and takes advantage of highly optimized blas libs, etc.
  - antoinealb 5y ago
    Even native python is not as slow as people expect. And scientific languages are terribly slow, see for example loops in Matlab, which are terribly slow.
    - sidpatil 5y ago
      FORTRAN, the OG of scientific languages, is not slow. In fact, that's why it's still used to this day.
      - antoinealb 5y ago
        That's true, i was more thinking of scientific interpreted languages, a la R, Mathematica, matlab
      - dralley 5y ago
        In fact it may well be the fastest language - although it's hard to compete with the sheer number of man hours spent on C/C++ compilers.
        adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        while it isn't inherently slow, all the open source compilers are missing a lot of modern improvements. The default libm in particular is often a few times slower than those provided by Julia.
ImprobableTruth 5y ago
This is just the usual "proprietary software is higher quality, we swear". Accurately voicing my thoughts on this would probably go against the HN guidelines, so I'll just let this sentence from the article speak for itself: >But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited. Well, good luck with that.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  I don't think they're wrong. Open source does not work with product management. There will always be friction with what is on the roadmap vs what the community wants to add. Additionally, if Wolfram wants to monetize it somehow, they have to own supporting it--including the contributions that they don't necessarily want. If they anger the community, then the community forks the project and Wolfram loses complete control or is in the same place they were before they open sourced it (but now their IP is gone). I don't see how they (Wolfram) benefit from FOSS at this point.
  - mountainriver 5y ago
    Huh? Open source absolutely works with product management, their are tons of companies doing this today. OSS is a great way to market and up sell to SaaS
    - carry_bit 5y ago
      But then companies that make their money by upselling to SaaS really don't like it when Amazon comes along, takes the software, and undercuts them in the cloud. The company then scrambles to change their license to disallow that. Wolfram in that sense is just being honest about their motivations by having it be proprietary from the get-go.
      - mountainriver 5y ago
        There are ways of preventing that like what elastic did. If wolfram honestly wants to be the sole computation language no one is going to pay for that all the time
silvestrov 5y ago
TLDR: some types of software needs more than programming. omitted TLDR: some of the above can only be done by paying people money to do them. Company needs income for that. omitted exibit: why haven't Gimp thrown Photoshop, Pixelmater and others from the throne. If programmers were the only people needed, then all those commercial image editors would be gone from the market. (but a unix shell only needs programming by a single person, so there are no commercial successful unix shells)
- ozten 5y ago
  Blender is a counter example. They prioritized UX and are now eating into commercial use cases.
  - mejutoco 5y ago
    I love blender. Ironically, I remember when blender was a commercial project and they agreed to open source it if they reached a certain amount of donations. The quality of it might be because some real company was using the project to do daily work (even before the ui overhaul).
  - DantesKite 5y ago
    They’re also being subsidized by billion dollar organizations.
- indymike 5y ago
  > so there are no commercial successful unix shells The most successful commercial unix shells are graphical shells shipped with operating systems. Most users consider the visual function of these shells to be the actual operating system. I.e. "MacOS now has scrollbars in preferences!" MacOS, iOS, Android all are good examples. To build a shell of commercial value you end up having to do a little more that a command line shell does. BTW, the biggest part of Adobe's value prop is AdobeStock templates, fonts, stock art and stock video. This makes it really easy to start a project and get to done quickly. It would be interesting to see some of the third party marketplaces like Envato, Issuu and CreativeMarket plugins for open source products... And non-Adobe products, too (Affinity, love the products! Badly need a way to quickly get a few hundred templates in there... Corel, your ecosystem is a dumpster fire)
throwbynight38 5y ago
Java is open source yet maintained centrally. I think the fact that tens of thousands of security patches were deployed this past week attests to the success of Java.
deleted 5y ago
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M8LNf6X 5y ago
because you're greedy bastard. once writen in open source you're become a useless. keep your fear with yourself.
idealmedtech 5y ago
The only point here that _may_ be considered valid is #5: Crowd sourced decisions may be bad for you. The reason one could consider this to be true is that often open source design is hype driven, and not long term benefit driven. Exceptions can be seen in communities like Rust, but there's still lots of issues there (like async). However just because there's lots of hype does _not_ mean you have to bow to it. You can easily commit to a read-only release of the code which obviates all the need to actually participate in the community. And of course there's successful models like VSCode, which manages to be _mostly_ open, but all the "cool parts" (like Copilot) are still not possible to reproduce with the provided source alone. Many ways to open source your code and still have people pay for it!
mkl95 5y ago
Unreal Engine 4 (idk about 5) is not open source, but getting access to the Github repo only takes a few minutes. It is an elegant way of letting people fork some code while making it clear it is a proprietary solution.
seanhunter 5y ago
If he had said "It isn't open source because it's ours and we don't want it to be" that would have much more integrity than this.
- alphachloride 5y ago
  Why do you think he is lacking integrity as it stands?
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago
    Because he makes hundreds of false statements disparaging open source - and it's contributors - throughout the whole article.
    - otterley 5y ago
      Can you identify some of them?
      - somenewaccount1 5y ago
        Yes, I can.
rwmj 5y ago
Firstly I think if Wolfram wants to keep Mathematica closed source, that's his choice and I have no problem with it. But, doesn't this indicate quite a poor architecture? Mathematica appears to be (or should be) composed of many different mathematical modules and capabilities that it can do. It should be possible to develop those separately while retaining a centrally controlled "beautiful" architecture to bind it all together.
- alok-g 5y ago
  >> doesn't this indicate quite a poor architecture In my opinion (I've used Mathematica heavily), no. My best guess, they are able to develop the modules and capabilities separately, i.e., divided cleanly into multiple teams. Their choice of keeping it closed source is orthogonal and does not indicate a poor architecture.
jFriedensreich 5y ago
all of these points can be just countered by pointing to sqlite.they have a drastically different community philosophy that shows that there is no such thing as THE oss development model. A language without an open source core is hard to take seriously unless maybe it is just part of a proprietary software suite (max/msp,labview etc.) that makes little sense to use without, but i guess this is exactly where wolfram stands. As far as i heard the performance characteristics of wolfram would be not very well suited to general purpose programming or web services anyways. though i am always jealous when there is a new demo from stephen. most demos would not be possible without that super tight integration of the language and the notebook.
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tombh 5y ago
(sorry for the cheap meme, but..) linux enters the chat
schappim 5y ago
The clear example counter to his argument would be https://www.blender.org/ https://www.blender.org/
jrm4 5y ago
As a huge FOSS guy, I have to say -- this list is excellent. I think where this debate/discussion goes off the rails is a lack of appreciation for every aspect of things in their place. The GPL + Stallman + FOSS et al are absolutely necessary as a sort of extreme visible working model; an endpoint to an Overton Window of this sort of thing and as such I completely support it. But also, I also do not believe that supporting it requires full and complete buy-in, the way some people do religion. I'm glad it's THERE, and ALSO not everyone has to do it. This is not hypocritical or even conflicting.
zenonu 5y ago
Multiple comments here talking about releasing the source code, as if it's just throwing it over the wall. Open-sourcing software successfully is a commitment to engage with the community on design and implementation over time. Otherwise at best it will be forked and then then lead by another group.
rob_c 5y ago
seriously on point 9? "Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market" I don't know where to begin with this alone let alone the rest of the diatripe. Closed works for them, their product and their vision, but keep it in scope of what works for you or doesn't, not attack an alternative model because you feel superior...
munro 5y ago
I have a friend that uses Mathematica, and I had some symbolic math I wanted to run a solver on last week, so I thought I'd give it a try. It wasn't any better than sympy from what I could tell. I ended up taking a monte carlo approach anyway. Generating the simulations was soooo slow in Mathematica compared to numpy. After that demo, I'll have to say the Python ecosystem is far superior for all it's flaws. Sure the documentation is all over the place, there's no unified design so it all feels different, and lot of choices to do the same thing. But when you need something to work right now, at least I have options to switch things out or even fix the code. Wolfram has a lot of lofty ideas that hasn't been delivered on. 13) Try to do everything, but poorly But seriously how can you build a unified model of computation, when we're still figuring things out? I just tried jax yesterday, their approach to jit & automatic vectorization is really interesting. Wolfram, do you even have a jit? This article gives me less respect for the Wolfram Tech, they're building off the shoulders of giants trying to package it up in some nice soft serve product--it's not a good look to criticize something your building your empire off of.
- blt 5y ago
  Numerical simulations and jit-compiled autodiffed float32 operations are not Mathematica's main purpose.
  - munro 5y ago
    I think it's disingenuous to say simulations aren't the main purpose when it's built into many places like `NIntegrate[f, ..., Method -> MonteCarlo]`, and calculus definitely a main purpose of Mathematica. My point with jax wasn't that I want it to be that, but that Wolfram Tech is never going to be able to compete with specialized solutions. Instead what you have is a tool that does a lot of things poorly, and kind of the antithesis to this article--with the main point being Wolfram Tech is built off of open research & open source.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Quoting from the blog post. But Wolfram’s vision for computation is much more profound—to unify and automate computation across computational fields, application areas, user types, interfaces and deployments. The problem with Wolfram Tech is the above objective can be done by doing one thing and is improving developer ergonomics. I would say that the Wolfram Language would need a complete overhaul. When I was using it was basically combining Lisp (but using the original M-expression syntax), Symbolic computation and an approach to including every possible mathematical field. These problems are just since Mathematica is so old it didn't need to or even the concepts of what it achieved it is one of the biggest issues. So, if the Wolfram language just made a bunch of non breaking changes and copy Javascript like syntax then it might actually be useful but right now I don't see it achieving anything like that at all.
- rob_c 5y ago
  Heaven forbid more researchers and people fluent in tek took the time to learn to code better rather than moan they can't input maths symbols into the keyboard... I'd love to see basic computing taught alongside algebra but apparently "thats too difficult"...
mwcampbell 5y ago
> Paid software offers an open quid pro quo This section points out a valid problem with business models based on open source, but closing the source and requiring payment doesn't inherently solve the problem. In fact, closing the source, which is the usual means of enforcing the paid license, introduces another problem: the developer could be doing something nefarious in addition to requiring payment, and it would be very difficult to find that out because the source is closed. True, reviewing a large open-source codebase is also difficult, but not, I assume, as difficult as reverse-engineering a large blob or set of blobs. Perhaps processor architectures and/or operating systems could impose restrictions to make reverse engineering easier, but that would fundamentally be at odds with license enforcement. If only we could fix our species to guarantee trustworthiness.
- siwatanejo 5y ago
  In fact it's not about "payment" or "paid". The opposite of opensource is proprietary, not "paid". You can pay for FLOSS.
m3kw9 5y ago
Why should they need to explain that?
layer8 5y ago
10 and 11 are really the only reasons.
GnarfGnarf 5y ago
#13 - Customer support
GuB-42 5y ago
Most points are actually about community driven software more than open source. Not all of open source is community driven. Opening the source is just that, making the source code available, you don't have to accept pull requests or let anyone else decide what to do. Qt for instance is not community driven, and because it is dual-licensed, it can't be. The other arguments are more acceptable: we want to make money and we think opening the source goes in the way. I don't like it but I understand.
comprev 5y ago
Needs (2019)
DantesKite 5y ago
Anthropologists should study open source communities. Would give more insight into how cults form. Jon’s essay was insightful and elucidating. Truly. And it seems like they’re accomplishing their goals. I haven’t read a single comment that steelman’s his position and criticizes it well. Thanks for the essay though. It was lovely.
lvl100 5y ago
I really think Wolfram missed a huge opportunity in mid 2000’s. They basically had the best interactive programming experience by far. Mathematica should/could have been an essential tool for all data scientists. I still prefer Mathematica interface over Jupyter.
crazypython 5y ago
Just use (A)GPL. Blender, OBS, and VLC use GPL and stay high quality open source software.
klelatti 5y ago
I’m sorry to say that I was shocked by this article. I have no objection to Wolfram remaining closed source - if they prefer that model and want to make money from it then it’s up to them. However, that they feel that they have to justify this by implying that their approach is clearly superior to open source in innovation, long term commitment and user experience I’m afraid leaves me with a rather negative impression (to put it mildly!). A lot of open source is flawed but some disproves these assertions comprehensively. If they really wanted to ‘unify all of computation into a single coherent language’, which sounds like a mammoth task, they would surely welcome quality contributions - beyond just picking up and using other open source projects - from whoever feels able to make them rather than a small group of individuals working in private.
- leephillips 5y ago
  You might be slightly tardy to the party: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963287
mabbo 5y ago
The real reason is very clear to me: Wolfram builds a fairly unique and complicated product. Their advantage comes largely from a very narrow market with few competitors. Releasing the source would deprive them of that advantage, which has financial implications. The benefits of additional contributors might not outweigh the potential loss from competition. The article is a typical critique of open source generally, and one can debate how true or false each point is, but it's not relevant to the real reasons. It's just a smokescreen over "we'd think we'll make more money this way".
knorker 5y ago
I think the question needs to be a bit more well formed for the answer written. Does he mean "why doesn't Wolfram opensource all its stuff", or "why not opensource and also take contributions from a community", or "why is it that Wolfram is finding itself in a situation where there is no viable opensource competitor", or something else? I believe there are some Google opensource projects where the source is open (and even a libre license), but it's still presented as-is, with no real way for anyone outside Google to contribute. There are other projects where there's a clear corporate owner, but outside patches are accepted. It's not that I disagree with this post, but it's very unclear what this person means by "open source". So in the most scathing of all critiques, I would summarize this post as "not even wrong".
IYasha 5y ago
Not very convincing, I'd say.
antoineMoPa 5y ago
Claim number 9 might be right for the specific listed cases but it certainly isn't true for all domains. In the browser world, open source has clearly produced better results (chrome, firefox, webkit) than the closed source alternatives (IE before chromuim Edge). Also, this post is an insult to big projects such as Blender, which have been a terrain for innovation and experimentation for years. Blender is also is an example of long term effort and unified design. In the software library world, open source clearly wins in terms of market adoption and innovation. If the author has a car, it probably runs linux, sqlite, and many other open source components. In AI research, the common set of tools used by the community is open source (Tensorflow, Python, etc.) In conclusion, interesting perspective, but it does not match mine at all.
Recursing 5y ago
(2019) Interesting compared to this recent take: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...
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temptemptemp111 5y ago
Wolfram et al can't think their way out of a paper bag anymore because they're abstracted away the world and now live in their own fantastical fabrication. No pressure to go open source but this is easy to take apart: 1) A coherent vision requires centralized design » -- You can do that with FOSS 2) High-level languages need more design than low-level languages » -- You can do that with FOSS 3) You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields » -- You can do that with FOSS 4) Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too » -- You can do that with FOSS 5) Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you » -- You can do that with FOSS ... Same for the rest, just saving myself time. These people can create endless content about their rationalizations for obfuscating how things really work. Which is hair-brained abstractions.
mirekrusin 5y ago
It seems like Facebook doesn't have problem with releasing open source project [0] while keeping centralised control over it. Why not just say they want to monetize it? Arguably even pure, single monetizing argument can be challanged as their adoption would increase tenfold, if not more and there are tons of ways to monetize popular technology. [0] https://github.com/facebook/flow https://github.com/facebook/flow
k1ll3r 5y ago
Wolfram isn't open source because Wolfram (the man) is an ego maniac and a control freak. This isn't an adhominem - some men are just that way.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  is he the guy who wrote a book to explain everything?
  - nayuki 5y ago
    Yes, in "A New Kind of Science" (2002) he uses his cellular automata theory as the basis of explaining all of physics and computation. Very narcissistic if you ask me. Not to mention that it's not a good mathematical model and doesn't really improve on the state of the art.
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chobytes 5y ago
Honestly I feel like Mathematica is one of the better arguments for the quality of proprietary software. After spending time using it, reading their documentation, and interacting with their support staff, its downright painful by comparison using the free alternatives.
snird 5y ago
Their more recent post titled "Six Reasons Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source"[1] is even more cringey. Is this directed to managers who need to link to a reasoning against other managers making the claim for open-source alternatives? If so, this assumes those managers aren't that competent, which is insultiong at best. 1: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...
- oolonthegreat 5y ago
  I laughed so hard at this. It's like "We took all the good parts of being open source, and the good parts of NOT being open source".
  - pingsl 5y ago
    Both of the two blogs are very convincible. The only question to me is which one I should share with my friends?
turbinerneiter 5y ago
Well, that's a cancelled subscription from me. I have no problem with them not being Open Source, but these arguments are all orthogonal to being Open Source. There is a valid argument for not being Open Source: "We think a proprietary program with a monthly license fee is the best business model for our company and product." You say that, I respect you. You bring a bunch of bad arguments, I lose trust.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  This was written two years ago. Why would you cancel a subscription over it if their software works for you?
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    Becaue I barely ever used it and I mostly had it to support what I believed to be a cool company.
asimpletune 5y ago
> open source distributes design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task, but large-scale, unified design needs centralized control and sustained effort. I actually think at a minimum that this isn't true, but it's also possible that the complete opposite is true. OSS has maintainers who know what they're doing. Fundamentally, one of their most important jobs is to gatekeep bad code and ideas from their project. It can be distributed, but it's not intrinsic to OSS at all. I find that usually the opposite is the case, and that maintainers leverage the technical controls they have over projects (basically PR's and RFC's) to "anchor" all decisions through them, while still trying to scale the work by having other people do as much of the work as possible. However, I would say that potentially the even the reverse of what the author is saying is true in same cases. > design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task From my perspective in a lot of privately run companies, the design and features that end up making it to production are actually a bunch of little compromises between special interests within a company, who are all vying for control and credit of the product. It's precisely because OSS is free and requires an extremely high degree of skill upon the maintainers that it's able to eschew these kinds of office politics and deliver what they think is the "best" for the software. Obviously some projects are better than others, but I think there's a reason that OSS almost always tends to be of much higher quality than privately developed software. These "self-assembling" groups that organize along political boundaries of various product owners or managers is probably one thing that doesn't help get the best ideas to find immediate traction. Am I wrong about this?
throwawaybutwhy 5y ago
One argument for Open Source: Stephen is not immortal. While it is vain to expect anything made by humans to last forever, a computer program can definitely outlive its creators if there are enough users and maintainers. Hat tip to Adm.Hopper.
croes 5y ago
According to this list, shouldn't Windows Mobile have been the fiercest competitor of iOS and not Android?
jopsen 5y ago
Releasing an open source doesn't mean you have to accept contributions. You don't have to be an open source project. And as an open source project it is fair to say you don't want a contribution because, you can't foresee future implications, and you don't think the problem it addresses is something you have time to form an opinion on.
jimmyvalmer 5y ago
Only relevant sentence: "Salaries are a good motivation." I feel sorry for the schlubs who have to write these corporate blogs. Also, everyone here over 40 would prefer going back in time to closed-source. Yes, M$ would still reign supreme, but at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Also, everyone here over 40 would prefer going back in time to closed-source. Yes, M$ would still reign supreme, but at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy. That's a very strong claim. MS sucked without FOSS competition, and is quite happy to drive the surveillance economy.
  - jimmyvalmer 5y ago
    Classic ignoratio elenchi triggered by emotional response to M$.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Your claim was that > at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy. and I contend that MS would happily run the surveillance economy just as much while leaving everything else worse off. Not ignoratio elenchi at all.
      - jimmyvalmer 5y ago
        It's the 1990s during the New York Yankees heyday. Performance enhancing drugs now enable lesser teams to end their dynasty. My point was that I was a happier baseball fan before the steroid era, even if that meant the hated Yankees would remain dominant. That the Yankees would also have cheated if they'd caught on fast enough is irrelevant.
    - somenewaccount1 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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musesum 5y ago
How is software growth like a plant? What are the nutrients (revenue/volunteers)? The positive feedback loop (commits). The negative feedback loop (deprecations)? Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer modeled the growth of plants[1]. Each has a shape, which evolved to exploit a certain terrain. Mathematica exploits one terrain. Sun Microsystems exploited another terrain with Java. I wonder if it possible to map these terrains across all the Github projects? [1] http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf
rg111 5y ago
Let me tell you how tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of students totally skipped Wolfram products and proprietary science products in general. Wolfram products are very highly priced, even much more so for the Indian market. Indian science and engineering colleges are usually very poorly funded save some IITs and premier provincial universities. There is no way in hell these colleges could ever have afforded MATLAB or Wolfram products. C and ForTran were taught at science institues- even at the very best ones. Students only learned this. By the year 2018, all of science universities of India fully switched to Python for Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. majors. They now teach NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, etc. They totally skipped Wolfram and Mathworks products. Why do I say "skipped"? Because with rapid economic growth and visible improvements in college fundings, Indian unis would have soon been able to afford proprietary science software. But they skipped it. They went straight from ForTran and C to Python ecosystem. Now, the market is flooded with thousands of core science grads with Python skills who have never worked with MATLAB or Mathematica. They are the losers in their models.
- kylehotchkiss 5y ago
  This article isn’t about the pricing of wolfram software. The price they charge is what it costs to develop, host, and support the software, plus innovate on it. They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software as software these days is as fundamental to education as the buildings we learn in.
  - rg111 5y ago
    > They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. This comment isn't about me wanting them to lower their prices for any market. > plus innovate on it Please. I would take an Open Source software anyday over Wolfram or Mathworks software. They are objectively much better. > Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software In case it wasn't clear from my original comment, I am glad, that Indian unis skipped wasting money on such sub-quality software. I am just mentioning that it is their loss. It is not the loss of the students or unis that cannot afford these.
hsnewman 5y ago
Wow, I'm supprised at all the false reasons, that are based on incorrect assumptions. For example, "bad design is expensive", the assumption is that Open Source has bad design. The assumption also is that Closed source is therefore good design. How can you know that a piece of software you can't see the source to has a better design than one you CAN see the source to? Just wow. edit: to add to the expensive note: paying for a license yearly for eternity is supposidly cheaper than free?
snarkypixel 5y ago
That's all bullshit. React is open source and still own the design and all the development roadmap. I honestly think wolfram is an amazing technology but until it embraces the open-source community it'll stay a language that most company will never want to use.
funstuff007 5y ago
“given enough eyeballs, all exploits are shallow.” - Raymond Eric
somenewaccount1 5y ago
Wow, this guy like to take a lot of credit for open source work and design - ignoring that so few people have ever even tried Thier bad software. Pathetic.
fchall 5y ago
"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." So true, as many projects have found out to their detriment in the last couple of years. Mathematica would be a juicy target for unproductive SJWs to take over.
deltaonefour 5y ago
"Free by side effect" This is an important thing idealists need to realize. If someone contributes their time to code for free then something else must be paying for that time. Think about it, if a software engineer contributes 100% his time to open source and gets ZERO income in return... well he's eventually going to starve to death. It's unsustainable... At Some point in this equation the software engineer must be coding for money and mostly nobody pays money for open source code. So whatever this software engineer is coding for money... likely it's closed source.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
After purchasing a one month subscription to Wolfram Language Desktop twice before, yesterday I paid for a one year subscription and decided to really explore the language, pre-trained models, and libraries. The article didn’t come across well. They don’t need to justify being closed source. What concerns me is that much of my hacking fun projects and also a lot of my work over the last 40 years has been in Common Lisp. I can take very old code that I have written and run it with several good open source systems and two fine closed source systems. I am sure the Wolfram company is not going anywhere, even if the founder is 60 (that is ten years younger than I am). But, if I were younger, could I be sure if being able to run my Wolfram Language code in 40 years? I don’t know. The support for Wolfram Language is very good. I also pay much more that Wolfram for LispWorks Common Lisp (about $3500 to purchase and about another $600/year maintenance for support and upgrades). There is some pleasure in using well supported tools, and there is pleasure in using open source software. We get to decide individually what we want to use.
dschuetz 5y ago
The only reason not to open source is monetization monopoly. Wolfram could as well be open source and still not be like all those 10 excuses they pose as arguments against open source. They just want to keep their code hidden, and not be re-applied elsewhere.
fargle 5y ago
What a jackhole! A study in basically why open source works and is always better - than crappy corporations that would write a blog like this. 1. "A coherent vision requires centralized design" - BULLSHIT! you can do open source with a centralized or whatever kind of governance you want. 2. "High-level languages need more design than low-level languages" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! maybe true, but who said open source can't handle the "more" design required? I can't think of a single open source design with, say 30 million lines of code, that is "designed" ok. 3. "You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields" - BULLSHIT! so, open source is never ever multidisiplinary? from disparate fields? This is EXACTLY why it should be open! How do you even presume to do this by excluding all the diverse stakeholders? 4. "Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too" - BULLSHIT! the only thing harder than getting some dedicated guy working for free doing the hard boring stuff, is to get your management to allocate schedule and budget for it. 5. "Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! so unilateral corporate decisions are never bad? And open source necessarily means crowd-sourced governance? And even if the decisions are sometimes bad, couldn't they also more often be good? 6. "Our developers work for you, not just themselves" - TOTAL BULLSHIT! they 100% work for YOU not me. I'd love to help. For free! but I can't because a) I don't work for you and b) if I did, you wouldn't let me do what I want. 7. "Unified computation requires unified design" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! so.. open source can never create a unified design? You could literally change nothing in your governance structure, publish your source, and it'd be exactly as unified (whatever that means) as it already is. But by magic, open sourceness means that the contributors are incapable of creating a unified vision? 8. "Unified representation requires unified design" - BULLSHIT LAZY COPY OF PREVIOUS ARGUMENT! 9. "Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market" - BULLSHIT! WHAT! inovation has always been linked to coloboration and sharing. You can't inovate in an echo chamber. Yes, right, you go on paying your developers to inovate on a fixed schedule and budget... 10. "Paid software offers an open quid pro quo" - LYING BULLSHIT! like because the open-ness of open software is so sneaky that even when it tells you exactly what you get, you can't be sure. And definitely corporate license agreements bring 100% clarity and performance guarantees. 11. "It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D" - Yes!!! and that is why companies should exist. Open source does not mean that wolfram won't sell licenses and make money $$$. In fact, the author has already assured us that wolfram developers are the best, the most unified, hard-boring-working, coherent, inovative people to be found. So regardless of the sourcing, they'd be dominant in the market, right? So what's the problem? 12. "Bad design is expensive" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! Soooo... open source == bad design and you == good design? ya... And designs hidden behind a closed source wall are never, ever bad, right?

246 points by AJRF 5y ago

at this point the ecological niche of open source computation / algorithmic stacks is so well occupied that even if wolfram were to open source their code (as an attempt to remain relevant?), it is unlikely it would change much in the landscape?

killjoywashere 5y ago

Who are Wolfram’s customers? I recall back in 1993 a girl I knew did an internship at Black and Veatch and she enjoyed it, but is B&V really the target market? If so, I don’t see how “math” is the major draw.

rwmj 5y ago
Lots of universities and similar research/educational institutes have site licenses.

pmarreck 5y ago

There's been a slow but noticeable march of open-source things replacing closed-source things over time. [Open source] software will eat the world, and all that

bborud 5y ago

It would be more interesting to address why they chose a pricing model that guaranteed their products would never be a more mainstream consumer product and pretty much irrelevant for almost all enterprise contexts where a computational or analytical capability is needed. Because I don't think they are so stupid this wasn't a conscious decision on their part.

ozim 5y ago
I don't really know but lets play their advocate. Probably they are stuck in academia market or really research market because that is who they know and this is their target audience. Moving to more enterprise context would cost them effort, they would have to hire enterprise sales people and spend money on making new connections. Then to gain real foothold they would have to implement security/auditing/SSO and other enterprise requirements. Which would be quite heavy investment and quite high risk one, because they will never know if any of it will be useful. Like they get first customer, roll out all of that and then growth stagnates and maybe they are stuck on 2-3 customers who keep making demands, but there is no growth to cover for the "enterprise features" investments. Keep in mind also that not everyone wants to be a unicorn, if they are happy with what they have and roll with it, it is also fine.
analog31 5y ago
I think to make it mainstream would require making it different. The number of people who actually have a use for Mathematica is pretty small. Very few people understand both math and programming. Most people who can program are already employed as programmers. In a larger organization, rather than buying 10 licenses for 200 bucks each, it's better to buy 1 license for 2000 bucks and have everybody bring their math work to the "math person." Organizations see this as a natural division of labor. And it's easy to justify that cost because you can show that the math person is using Mathematica full time. They would have to add more non-programming and non-math features. And at the end of the day, they'd still be competing with free. In my own case, I've used Mathematica, and I love it. But the standard arguments in favor of using free tools have all materialized over the span of my career, and I'm happy enough with Python.
- bborud 5y ago
  Well, let's for arguments sake consider the most important demographic in my mind: me :-). (That's what most people do anyway). Joking aside. I'd love to make Mathematica part of my toolbox, but the steep pricing makes me think about all the other software I pay license fees on that I depend on, and I need another software expense like I need a third buttock. If it wasn't a recurring license, or a recurring license at a significantly lowered price, that would make it different.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Indeed, in my case, I've got my basic toolchain installed on more than a half dozen computers. At work, I do hardware related R&D, so I need my tools at multiple workstations in the lab. At home, a work-at-home computer and a personal computer. If I share something, my victims need to install their own copy of the tools. Then there's the whole world of code running on microcontrollers, which is how I prototype hardware gadgets, also in multiple locations. There is one piece of domain specific software that I use, and that is tied to a single computer, but I only use it sporadically when I need to do that particular kind of design work. I appreciate Wolfram's vision for a universal computing platform, but aside from the problem of getting everybody to agree on what that should look like, it's not a realistic dream unless it addresses things like economics and logistics.
idanman 5y ago
Not sure about that. If Matlab is their main competition, then they are much cheaper and you get tons more (that you may never use but its there...) for the price of just Matlab's base software. The downside is that the engineering community by and large uses Matlab because it's what the legacy code is and it is taught in school. I've used Mathematica and I enjoy using it (and Python) more than Matlab but at the end I have to use Matlab because that's what my colleagues use.
- ansgri 5y ago
  Are they that close now to be often interchangeable? Last I looked, they were as different as Lisp is to C: Mathematica is very strong for symbolic manipulation and discrete simulations and DSLs and can somewhat do numerics, whereas Matlab can get you serious performance in numerics but at the cost of awfully inflexible language.
kylehotchkiss 5y ago
Wolfram’s suite of software seems like it’d require very specialized support staff. Maybe the higher price point helps keep the customer support side of the business more maintainable?

TheDesolate0 5y ago

Mr Crabs: MONEY!

User23 5y ago

I understand Mr. Wolfram's decision to be a billionaire with a small army of brilliant persons at his beck and call. I also understand his desire to keep complete control of what he's built. All that being said, I sincerely hope he makes provisions to make his work Free at some point after his death. Because, if he doesn't, lacking his admittedly ingenius leadership, it will be lost to obscurity at best. That would be a shame for humanity.

bgandrew 5y ago
don't be too negative, there are lots of alternatives. humanity will lose almost nothing if wolfram cease to exists.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Most of these are about wanting control over the design of the software - but releasing their code doesn't have any impact on that - I don't get it? Java is open source - Oracle still tightly controls and manages the design of Java. For example 'Bad design is expensive' - how releasing your source lead to bad design? That's a complete non-sequitur.

chubot 5y ago
They are arguing it does have impact on that. The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success. So I think it's realistic to at least engage with their argument seriously rather than dismiss it. The argument is that open source licenses are incompatible with the kind paid license they're offering their customers. These licenses pay for the salary of their skilled employees. Oracle makes money EXACTLY the same way -- by selling commercial licenses to a non-open-source database. That's why Java can be open source and not bankrupt the company. Again, the argument here seems to be Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay for Wolfram ! ----- edit: Since this comment is highly upvoted and visible, I'll mention that I'm seeking funding for a compiler engineer for the Oil shell, which I just mentioned on the blog: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#more-ways-to-cut-scope http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#mor... So I know from over 5 years of direct personal experience that compiler engineers don't just show up to your open source project and start implementing things! Even if you have tens of thousands of readers on Hacker News for years. (Oil has had 48 contributors but not very consistently, which is understandable.) To be clear, I did not expect help! I have asked for it, but I thought I would be able to finish it myself. So it looks like hiring someone with specialized skills is the most realistic way to accelerate the project (now that the language design is in good shape). This funding is to finish the Python to C++ translation, which is already half done. Example: Oil's Parser is 160x to 200x Faster Than It Was 2 Years Ago http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html (lots of progress since then) I'm applying for 50K euros of funding from NLNet. Also in the process of setting up Github Sponsors. E-mail me at andy@oilshell.org if you want to make a donation -- I think I will need at least $250K to properly pay for this position. If you're a professional programmer and spend 2 hours fussing with a shell script, that's probably worth a few hundreds dollars. I'll start mentioning this in more posts when everything is set up, but I thought I would use this extremely relevant topic to raise awareness. Programming languages don't pay for themselves! https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/oil-language-tour.html https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/oil-language-tou...

rp1 5y ago

Almost none of the reasons have anything to do with releasing the source. You can release the source but still maintain central control. They shouldn’t even have posted this. Obviously they want to make money from their products, and that’s fine.

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foxfluff 5y ago
Yea, it's embarrassingly bad. It sounds like their idea of open source is something along the lines of "slap a MIT license on it, throw it over fence, and hope random nerds on the internet finish it while we wait idly."
- rob_c 5y ago
  Well the guy seems like a VP in corporate, probably would struggle with more than hello world himself...
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    I think it's far more likely that he is a better computer scientist, and a better programmer, than the vast majority of people you or I know.
    - rhapsodic 5y ago
      >I think it's far more likely that he is a better computer scientist, and a better programmer, than the vast majority of people you or I know. There's a lot of information about Jon McLoone available online (personal website, linkedin, etc.), but aside from his degree in Mathematics and a long association with Wolfram (in what appear to be primarily non-technical roles), I couldn't find anything that supports your statement. I'm not saying it's not out there, just that I couldn't find it.
cycomanic 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

Most of their points are valid for community driven open source projects but the existence of large corporate ones like Chrome, Android, .net, VS Code, Tensorflow and lots more prove that exerting tight central control while being fully open source is very much possible.

throw_m239339 5y ago
I mean, also Blender (written in pure C, Python scripting for UI). Pretty sure it's as complex as Wolfram at that point. Largely financed by private corporations now, still open source. The irony is that Blender USED to be a proprietary project, the community had to buy back the source code.
chubot 5y ago
This seems too obvious to repeat, but Google and Microsoft fund Chrome and VS Code through the profits from their other products like Search and Windows. Wolfram doesn't have that, and most businesses don't. It's very easy for us say "just make it open source" if we don't have to come up with a way of paying people! Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay for Wolfram !
- jayd16 5y ago
  That's fine. The bullets should just read "we can't figure out a FOSS business model" instead of calling it a code quality problem.
  - mountainriver 5y ago
    Exactly I’ve been building OSS for companies for a long time now, it’s an incredibly viable business model as shown by the boatload of products that do it today
- analognoise 5y ago
  Exactly this. Oh just be a world beating, industry leading, technical titan of a company with multiple revenue streams and you can afford to give away some code to make us all happy. Wolfram just has to launch an operating system, a search engine, a line of mobile phones and laptops, a cloud services unit, and sure then they'll give away Mathematica, what the hell why not?

VHRanger 5y ago

1 - 11: $$ 12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.

wyldfire 5y ago
At first I thought, "how could anything be slower than python?" And then I figured that you probably would've ported it to leverage things like numpy which makes a lot of operations into native code and takes advantage of highly optimized blas libs, etc.
- antoinealb 5y ago
  Even native python is not as slow as people expect. And scientific languages are terribly slow, see for example loops in Matlab, which are terribly slow.
  - sidpatil 5y ago
    FORTRAN, the OG of scientific languages, is not slow. In fact, that's why it's still used to this day.
    - antoinealb 5y ago
      That's true, i was more thinking of scientific interpreted languages, a la R, Mathematica, matlab
    - dralley 5y ago
      In fact it may well be the fastest language - although it's hard to compete with the sheer number of man hours spent on C/C++ compilers.
      - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        while it isn't inherently slow, all the open source compilers are missing a lot of modern improvements. The default libm in particular is often a few times slower than those provided by Julia.

ImprobableTruth 5y ago

This is just the usual "proprietary software is higher quality, we swear". Accurately voicing my thoughts on this would probably go against the HN guidelines, so I'll just let this sentence from the article speak for itself: >But our vision is a grand one—unify all of computation into a single coherent language, and for that, the FOSS development model is not well suited. Well, good luck with that.

candiddevmike 5y ago
I don't think they're wrong. Open source does not work with product management. There will always be friction with what is on the roadmap vs what the community wants to add. Additionally, if Wolfram wants to monetize it somehow, they have to own supporting it--including the contributions that they don't necessarily want. If they anger the community, then the community forks the project and Wolfram loses complete control or is in the same place they were before they open sourced it (but now their IP is gone). I don't see how they (Wolfram) benefit from FOSS at this point.
- mountainriver 5y ago
  Huh? Open source absolutely works with product management, their are tons of companies doing this today. OSS is a great way to market and up sell to SaaS
  - carry_bit 5y ago
    But then companies that make their money by upselling to SaaS really don't like it when Amazon comes along, takes the software, and undercuts them in the cloud. The company then scrambles to change their license to disallow that. Wolfram in that sense is just being honest about their motivations by having it be proprietary from the get-go.
    - mountainriver 5y ago
      There are ways of preventing that like what elastic did. If wolfram honestly wants to be the sole computation language no one is going to pay for that all the time

silvestrov 5y ago

TLDR: some types of software needs more than programming. omitted TLDR: some of the above can only be done by paying people money to do them. Company needs income for that. omitted exibit: why haven't Gimp thrown Photoshop, Pixelmater and others from the throne. If programmers were the only people needed, then all those commercial image editors would be gone from the market. (but a unix shell only needs programming by a single person, so there are no commercial successful unix shells)

ozten 5y ago
Blender is a counter example. They prioritized UX and are now eating into commercial use cases.
- mejutoco 5y ago
  I love blender. Ironically, I remember when blender was a commercial project and they agreed to open source it if they reached a certain amount of donations. The quality of it might be because some real company was using the project to do daily work (even before the ui overhaul).
- DantesKite 5y ago
  They’re also being subsidized by billion dollar organizations.
indymike 5y ago
> so there are no commercial successful unix shells The most successful commercial unix shells are graphical shells shipped with operating systems. Most users consider the visual function of these shells to be the actual operating system. I.e. "MacOS now has scrollbars in preferences!" MacOS, iOS, Android all are good examples. To build a shell of commercial value you end up having to do a little more that a command line shell does. BTW, the biggest part of Adobe's value prop is AdobeStock templates, fonts, stock art and stock video. This makes it really easy to start a project and get to done quickly. It would be interesting to see some of the third party marketplaces like Envato, Issuu and CreativeMarket plugins for open source products... And non-Adobe products, too (Affinity, love the products! Badly need a way to quickly get a few hundred templates in there... Corel, your ecosystem is a dumpster fire)

throwbynight38 5y ago

Java is open source yet maintained centrally. I think the fact that tens of thousands of security patches were deployed this past week attests to the success of Java.

deleted 5y ago

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M8LNf6X 5y ago

because you're greedy bastard. once writen in open source you're become a useless. keep your fear with yourself.

idealmedtech 5y ago

The only point here that _may_ be considered valid is #5: Crowd sourced decisions may be bad for you. The reason one could consider this to be true is that often open source design is hype driven, and not long term benefit driven. Exceptions can be seen in communities like Rust, but there's still lots of issues there (like async). However just because there's lots of hype does _not_ mean you have to bow to it. You can easily commit to a read-only release of the code which obviates all the need to actually participate in the community. And of course there's successful models like VSCode, which manages to be _mostly_ open, but all the "cool parts" (like Copilot) are still not possible to reproduce with the provided source alone. Many ways to open source your code and still have people pay for it!

mkl95 5y ago

Unreal Engine 4 (idk about 5) is not open source, but getting access to the Github repo only takes a few minutes. It is an elegant way of letting people fork some code while making it clear it is a proprietary solution.

seanhunter 5y ago

If he had said "It isn't open source because it's ours and we don't want it to be" that would have much more integrity than this.

alphachloride 5y ago
Why do you think he is lacking integrity as it stands?
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  Because he makes hundreds of false statements disparaging open source - and it's contributors - throughout the whole article.
  - otterley 5y ago
    Can you identify some of them?
    - somenewaccount1 5y ago
      Yes, I can.

rwmj 5y ago

Firstly I think if Wolfram wants to keep Mathematica closed source, that's his choice and I have no problem with it. But, doesn't this indicate quite a poor architecture? Mathematica appears to be (or should be) composed of many different mathematical modules and capabilities that it can do. It should be possible to develop those separately while retaining a centrally controlled "beautiful" architecture to bind it all together.

alok-g 5y ago
>> doesn't this indicate quite a poor architecture In my opinion (I've used Mathematica heavily), no. My best guess, they are able to develop the modules and capabilities separately, i.e., divided cleanly into multiple teams. Their choice of keeping it closed source is orthogonal and does not indicate a poor architecture.

jFriedensreich 5y ago

all of these points can be just countered by pointing to sqlite.they have a drastically different community philosophy that shows that there is no such thing as THE oss development model. A language without an open source core is hard to take seriously unless maybe it is just part of a proprietary software suite (max/msp,labview etc.) that makes little sense to use without, but i guess this is exactly where wolfram stands. As far as i heard the performance characteristics of wolfram would be not very well suited to general purpose programming or web services anyways. though i am always jealous when there is a new demo from stephen. most demos would not be possible without that super tight integration of the language and the notebook.

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tombh 5y ago

(sorry for the cheap meme, but..) linux enters the chat

schappim 5y ago

The clear example counter to his argument would be https://www.blender.org/ https://www.blender.org/

jrm4 5y ago

As a huge FOSS guy, I have to say -- this list is excellent. I think where this debate/discussion goes off the rails is a lack of appreciation for every aspect of things in their place. The GPL + Stallman + FOSS et al are absolutely necessary as a sort of extreme visible working model; an endpoint to an Overton Window of this sort of thing and as such I completely support it. But also, I also do not believe that supporting it requires full and complete buy-in, the way some people do religion. I'm glad it's THERE, and ALSO not everyone has to do it. This is not hypocritical or even conflicting.

zenonu 5y ago

Multiple comments here talking about releasing the source code, as if it's just throwing it over the wall. Open-sourcing software successfully is a commitment to engage with the community on design and implementation over time. Otherwise at best it will be forked and then then lead by another group.

rob_c 5y ago

seriously on point 9? "Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market" I don't know where to begin with this alone let alone the rest of the diatripe. Closed works for them, their product and their vision, but keep it in scope of what works for you or doesn't, not attack an alternative model because you feel superior...

munro 5y ago

I have a friend that uses Mathematica, and I had some symbolic math I wanted to run a solver on last week, so I thought I'd give it a try. It wasn't any better than sympy from what I could tell. I ended up taking a monte carlo approach anyway. Generating the simulations was soooo slow in Mathematica compared to numpy. After that demo, I'll have to say the Python ecosystem is far superior for all it's flaws. Sure the documentation is all over the place, there's no unified design so it all feels different, and lot of choices to do the same thing. But when you need something to work right now, at least I have options to switch things out or even fix the code. Wolfram has a lot of lofty ideas that hasn't been delivered on. 13) Try to do everything, but poorly But seriously how can you build a unified model of computation, when we're still figuring things out? I just tried jax yesterday, their approach to jit & automatic vectorization is really interesting. Wolfram, do you even have a jit? This article gives me less respect for the Wolfram Tech, they're building off the shoulders of giants trying to package it up in some nice soft serve product--it's not a good look to criticize something your building your empire off of.

blt 5y ago
Numerical simulations and jit-compiled autodiffed float32 operations are not Mathematica's main purpose.
- munro 5y ago
  I think it's disingenuous to say simulations aren't the main purpose when it's built into many places like `NIntegrate[f, ..., Method -> MonteCarlo]`, and calculus definitely a main purpose of Mathematica. My point with jax wasn't that I want it to be that, but that Wolfram Tech is never going to be able to compete with specialized solutions. Instead what you have is a tool that does a lot of things poorly, and kind of the antithesis to this article--with the main point being Wolfram Tech is built off of open research & open source.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Quoting from the blog post. But Wolfram’s vision for computation is much more profound—to unify and automate computation across computational fields, application areas, user types, interfaces and deployments. The problem with Wolfram Tech is the above objective can be done by doing one thing and is improving developer ergonomics. I would say that the Wolfram Language would need a complete overhaul. When I was using it was basically combining Lisp (but using the original M-expression syntax), Symbolic computation and an approach to including every possible mathematical field. These problems are just since Mathematica is so old it didn't need to or even the concepts of what it achieved it is one of the biggest issues. So, if the Wolfram language just made a bunch of non breaking changes and copy Javascript like syntax then it might actually be useful but right now I don't see it achieving anything like that at all.

rob_c 5y ago
Heaven forbid more researchers and people fluent in tek took the time to learn to code better rather than moan they can't input maths symbols into the keyboard... I'd love to see basic computing taught alongside algebra but apparently "thats too difficult"...

mwcampbell 5y ago

> Paid software offers an open quid pro quo This section points out a valid problem with business models based on open source, but closing the source and requiring payment doesn't inherently solve the problem. In fact, closing the source, which is the usual means of enforcing the paid license, introduces another problem: the developer could be doing something nefarious in addition to requiring payment, and it would be very difficult to find that out because the source is closed. True, reviewing a large open-source codebase is also difficult, but not, I assume, as difficult as reverse-engineering a large blob or set of blobs. Perhaps processor architectures and/or operating systems could impose restrictions to make reverse engineering easier, but that would fundamentally be at odds with license enforcement. If only we could fix our species to guarantee trustworthiness.

siwatanejo 5y ago
In fact it's not about "payment" or "paid". The opposite of opensource is proprietary, not "paid". You can pay for FLOSS.

m3kw9 5y ago

Why should they need to explain that?

layer8 5y ago

10 and 11 are really the only reasons.

GnarfGnarf 5y ago

#13 - Customer support

GuB-42 5y ago

Most points are actually about community driven software more than open source. Not all of open source is community driven. Opening the source is just that, making the source code available, you don't have to accept pull requests or let anyone else decide what to do. Qt for instance is not community driven, and because it is dual-licensed, it can't be. The other arguments are more acceptable: we want to make money and we think opening the source goes in the way. I don't like it but I understand.

comprev 5y ago

Needs (2019)

DantesKite 5y ago

Anthropologists should study open source communities. Would give more insight into how cults form. Jon’s essay was insightful and elucidating. Truly. And it seems like they’re accomplishing their goals. I haven’t read a single comment that steelman’s his position and criticizes it well. Thanks for the essay though. It was lovely.

lvl100 5y ago

I really think Wolfram missed a huge opportunity in mid 2000’s. They basically had the best interactive programming experience by far. Mathematica should/could have been an essential tool for all data scientists. I still prefer Mathematica interface over Jupyter.

crazypython 5y ago

Just use (A)GPL. Blender, OBS, and VLC use GPL and stay high quality open source software.

klelatti 5y ago

I’m sorry to say that I was shocked by this article. I have no objection to Wolfram remaining closed source - if they prefer that model and want to make money from it then it’s up to them. However, that they feel that they have to justify this by implying that their approach is clearly superior to open source in innovation, long term commitment and user experience I’m afraid leaves me with a rather negative impression (to put it mildly!). A lot of open source is flawed but some disproves these assertions comprehensively. If they really wanted to ‘unify all of computation into a single coherent language’, which sounds like a mammoth task, they would surely welcome quality contributions - beyond just picking up and using other open source projects - from whoever feels able to make them rather than a small group of individuals working in private.

leephillips 5y ago
You might be slightly tardy to the party: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963287

mabbo 5y ago

The real reason is very clear to me: Wolfram builds a fairly unique and complicated product. Their advantage comes largely from a very narrow market with few competitors. Releasing the source would deprive them of that advantage, which has financial implications. The benefits of additional contributors might not outweigh the potential loss from competition. The article is a typical critique of open source generally, and one can debate how true or false each point is, but it's not relevant to the real reasons. It's just a smokescreen over "we'd think we'll make more money this way".

knorker 5y ago

I think the question needs to be a bit more well formed for the answer written. Does he mean "why doesn't Wolfram opensource all its stuff", or "why not opensource and also take contributions from a community", or "why is it that Wolfram is finding itself in a situation where there is no viable opensource competitor", or something else? I believe there are some Google opensource projects where the source is open (and even a libre license), but it's still presented as-is, with no real way for anyone outside Google to contribute. There are other projects where there's a clear corporate owner, but outside patches are accepted. It's not that I disagree with this post, but it's very unclear what this person means by "open source". So in the most scathing of all critiques, I would summarize this post as "not even wrong".

IYasha 5y ago

Not very convincing, I'd say.

antoineMoPa 5y ago

Claim number 9 might be right for the specific listed cases but it certainly isn't true for all domains. In the browser world, open source has clearly produced better results (chrome, firefox, webkit) than the closed source alternatives (IE before chromuim Edge). Also, this post is an insult to big projects such as Blender, which have been a terrain for innovation and experimentation for years. Blender is also is an example of long term effort and unified design. In the software library world, open source clearly wins in terms of market adoption and innovation. If the author has a car, it probably runs linux, sqlite, and many other open source components. In AI research, the common set of tools used by the community is open source (Tensorflow, Python, etc.) In conclusion, interesting perspective, but it does not match mine at all.

Recursing 5y ago

(2019) Interesting compared to this recent take: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...

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temptemptemp111 5y ago

Wolfram et al can't think their way out of a paper bag anymore because they're abstracted away the world and now live in their own fantastical fabrication. No pressure to go open source but this is easy to take apart: 1) A coherent vision requires centralized design » -- You can do that with FOSS 2) High-level languages need more design than low-level languages » -- You can do that with FOSS 3) You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields » -- You can do that with FOSS 4) Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too » -- You can do that with FOSS 5) Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you » -- You can do that with FOSS ... Same for the rest, just saving myself time. These people can create endless content about their rationalizations for obfuscating how things really work. Which is hair-brained abstractions.

mirekrusin 5y ago

It seems like Facebook doesn't have problem with releasing open source project [0] while keeping centralised control over it. Why not just say they want to monetize it? Arguably even pure, single monetizing argument can be challanged as their adoption would increase tenfold, if not more and there are tons of ways to monetize popular technology. [0] https://github.com/facebook/flow https://github.com/facebook/flow

k1ll3r 5y ago

Wolfram isn't open source because Wolfram (the man) is an ego maniac and a control freak. This isn't an adhominem - some men are just that way.

streamofdigits 5y ago
is he the guy who wrote a book to explain everything?
- nayuki 5y ago
  Yes, in "A New Kind of Science" (2002) he uses his cellular automata theory as the basis of explaining all of physics and computation. Very narcissistic if you ask me. Not to mention that it's not a good mathematical model and doesn't really improve on the state of the art.
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chobytes 5y ago

Honestly I feel like Mathematica is one of the better arguments for the quality of proprietary software. After spending time using it, reading their documentation, and interacting with their support staff, its downright painful by comparison using the free alternatives.

snird 5y ago

Their more recent post titled "Six Reasons Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source"[1] is even more cringey. Is this directed to managers who need to link to a reasoning against other managers making the claim for open-source alternatives? If so, this assumes those managers aren't that competent, which is insultiong at best. 1: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...

oolonthegreat 5y ago
I laughed so hard at this. It's like "We took all the good parts of being open source, and the good parts of NOT being open source".
- pingsl 5y ago
  Both of the two blogs are very convincible. The only question to me is which one I should share with my friends?

turbinerneiter 5y ago

Well, that's a cancelled subscription from me. I have no problem with them not being Open Source, but these arguments are all orthogonal to being Open Source. There is a valid argument for not being Open Source: "We think a proprietary program with a monthly license fee is the best business model for our company and product." You say that, I respect you. You bring a bunch of bad arguments, I lose trust.

DangitBobby 5y ago
This was written two years ago. Why would you cancel a subscription over it if their software works for you?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Becaue I barely ever used it and I mostly had it to support what I believed to be a cool company.

asimpletune 5y ago

> open source distributes design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task, but large-scale, unified design needs centralized control and sustained effort. I actually think at a minimum that this isn't true, but it's also possible that the complete opposite is true. OSS has maintainers who know what they're doing. Fundamentally, one of their most important jobs is to gatekeep bad code and ideas from their project. It can be distributed, but it's not intrinsic to OSS at all. I find that usually the opposite is the case, and that maintainers leverage the technical controls they have over projects (basically PR's and RFC's) to "anchor" all decisions through them, while still trying to scale the work by having other people do as much of the work as possible. However, I would say that potentially the even the reverse of what the author is saying is true in same cases. > design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task From my perspective in a lot of privately run companies, the design and features that end up making it to production are actually a bunch of little compromises between special interests within a company, who are all vying for control and credit of the product. It's precisely because OSS is free and requires an extremely high degree of skill upon the maintainers that it's able to eschew these kinds of office politics and deliver what they think is the "best" for the software. Obviously some projects are better than others, but I think there's a reason that OSS almost always tends to be of much higher quality than privately developed software. These "self-assembling" groups that organize along political boundaries of various product owners or managers is probably one thing that doesn't help get the best ideas to find immediate traction. Am I wrong about this?

throwawaybutwhy 5y ago

One argument for Open Source: Stephen is not immortal. While it is vain to expect anything made by humans to last forever, a computer program can definitely outlive its creators if there are enough users and maintainers. Hat tip to Adm.Hopper.

croes 5y ago

According to this list, shouldn't Windows Mobile have been the fiercest competitor of iOS and not Android?

jopsen 5y ago

Releasing an open source doesn't mean you have to accept contributions. You don't have to be an open source project. And as an open source project it is fair to say you don't want a contribution because, you can't foresee future implications, and you don't think the problem it addresses is something you have time to form an opinion on.

jimmyvalmer 5y ago

Only relevant sentence: "Salaries are a good motivation." I feel sorry for the schlubs who have to write these corporate blogs. Also, everyone here over 40 would prefer going back in time to closed-source. Yes, M$ would still reign supreme, but at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Also, everyone here over 40 would prefer going back in time to closed-source. Yes, M$ would still reign supreme, but at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy. That's a very strong claim. MS sucked without FOSS competition, and is quite happy to drive the surveillance economy.
- jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  Classic ignoratio elenchi triggered by emotional response to M$.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Your claim was that > at least the buck you made was an honest quid pro quo, and not accessory to the surveillance economy. and I contend that MS would happily run the surveillance economy just as much while leaving everything else worse off. Not ignoratio elenchi at all.
    - jimmyvalmer 5y ago
      It's the 1990s during the New York Yankees heyday. Performance enhancing drugs now enable lesser teams to end their dynasty. My point was that I was a happier baseball fan before the steroid era, even if that meant the hated Yankees would remain dominant. That the Yankees would also have cheated if they'd caught on fast enough is irrelevant.
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago

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musesum 5y ago

How is software growth like a plant? What are the nutrients (revenue/volunteers)? The positive feedback loop (commits). The negative feedback loop (deprecations)? Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer modeled the growth of plants[1]. Each has a shape, which evolved to exploit a certain terrain. Mathematica exploits one terrain. Sun Microsystems exploited another terrain with Java. I wonder if it possible to map these terrains across all the Github projects? [1] http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf

rg111 5y ago

Let me tell you how tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of students totally skipped Wolfram products and proprietary science products in general. Wolfram products are very highly priced, even much more so for the Indian market. Indian science and engineering colleges are usually very poorly funded save some IITs and premier provincial universities. There is no way in hell these colleges could ever have afforded MATLAB or Wolfram products. C and ForTran were taught at science institues- even at the very best ones. Students only learned this. By the year 2018, all of science universities of India fully switched to Python for Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. majors. They now teach NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, etc. They totally skipped Wolfram and Mathworks products. Why do I say "skipped"? Because with rapid economic growth and visible improvements in college fundings, Indian unis would have soon been able to afford proprietary science software. But they skipped it. They went straight from ForTran and C to Python ecosystem. Now, the market is flooded with thousands of core science grads with Python skills who have never worked with MATLAB or Mathematica. They are the losers in their models.

kylehotchkiss 5y ago
This article isn’t about the pricing of wolfram software. The price they charge is what it costs to develop, host, and support the software, plus innovate on it. They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software as software these days is as fundamental to education as the buildings we learn in.
- rg111 5y ago
  > They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. This comment isn't about me wanting them to lower their prices for any market. > plus innovate on it Please. I would take an Open Source software anyday over Wolfram or Mathworks software. They are objectively much better. > Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software In case it wasn't clear from my original comment, I am glad, that Indian unis skipped wasting money on such sub-quality software. I am just mentioning that it is their loss. It is not the loss of the students or unis that cannot afford these.

hsnewman 5y ago

Wow, I'm supprised at all the false reasons, that are based on incorrect assumptions. For example, "bad design is expensive", the assumption is that Open Source has bad design. The assumption also is that Closed source is therefore good design. How can you know that a piece of software you can't see the source to has a better design than one you CAN see the source to? Just wow. edit: to add to the expensive note: paying for a license yearly for eternity is supposidly cheaper than free?

snarkypixel 5y ago

That's all bullshit. React is open source and still own the design and all the development roadmap. I honestly think wolfram is an amazing technology but until it embraces the open-source community it'll stay a language that most company will never want to use.

funstuff007 5y ago

“given enough eyeballs, all exploits are shallow.” - Raymond Eric

somenewaccount1 5y ago

Wow, this guy like to take a lot of credit for open source work and design - ignoring that so few people have ever even tried Thier bad software. Pathetic.

fchall 5y ago

"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." So true, as many projects have found out to their detriment in the last couple of years. Mathematica would be a juicy target for unproductive SJWs to take over.

deltaonefour 5y ago

"Free by side effect" This is an important thing idealists need to realize. If someone contributes their time to code for free then something else must be paying for that time. Think about it, if a software engineer contributes 100% his time to open source and gets ZERO income in return... well he's eventually going to starve to death. It's unsustainable... At Some point in this equation the software engineer must be coding for money and mostly nobody pays money for open source code. So whatever this software engineer is coding for money... likely it's closed source.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

After purchasing a one month subscription to Wolfram Language Desktop twice before, yesterday I paid for a one year subscription and decided to really explore the language, pre-trained models, and libraries. The article didn’t come across well. They don’t need to justify being closed source. What concerns me is that much of my hacking fun projects and also a lot of my work over the last 40 years has been in Common Lisp. I can take very old code that I have written and run it with several good open source systems and two fine closed source systems. I am sure the Wolfram company is not going anywhere, even if the founder is 60 (that is ten years younger than I am). But, if I were younger, could I be sure if being able to run my Wolfram Language code in 40 years? I don’t know. The support for Wolfram Language is very good. I also pay much more that Wolfram for LispWorks Common Lisp (about $3500 to purchase and about another $600/year maintenance for support and upgrades). There is some pleasure in using well supported tools, and there is pleasure in using open source software. We get to decide individually what we want to use.

dschuetz 5y ago

The only reason not to open source is monetization monopoly. Wolfram could as well be open source and still not be like all those 10 excuses they pose as arguments against open source. They just want to keep their code hidden, and not be re-applied elsewhere.

fargle 5y ago

What a jackhole! A study in basically why open source works and is always better - than crappy corporations that would write a blog like this. 1. "A coherent vision requires centralized design" - BULLSHIT! you can do open source with a centralized or whatever kind of governance you want. 2. "High-level languages need more design than low-level languages" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! maybe true, but who said open source can't handle the "more" design required? I can't think of a single open source design with, say 30 million lines of code, that is "designed" ok. 3. "You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields" - BULLSHIT! so, open source is never ever multidisiplinary? from disparate fields? This is EXACTLY why it should be open! How do you even presume to do this by excluding all the diverse stakeholders? 4. "Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too" - BULLSHIT! the only thing harder than getting some dedicated guy working for free doing the hard boring stuff, is to get your management to allocate schedule and budget for it. 5. "Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! so unilateral corporate decisions are never bad? And open source necessarily means crowd-sourced governance? And even if the decisions are sometimes bad, couldn't they also more often be good? 6. "Our developers work for you, not just themselves" - TOTAL BULLSHIT! they 100% work for YOU not me. I'd love to help. For free! but I can't because a) I don't work for you and b) if I did, you wouldn't let me do what I want. 7. "Unified computation requires unified design" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! so.. open source can never create a unified design? You could literally change nothing in your governance structure, publish your source, and it'd be exactly as unified (whatever that means) as it already is. But by magic, open sourceness means that the contributors are incapable of creating a unified vision? 8. "Unified representation requires unified design" - BULLSHIT LAZY COPY OF PREVIOUS ARGUMENT! 9. "Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market" - BULLSHIT! WHAT! inovation has always been linked to coloboration and sharing. You can't inovate in an echo chamber. Yes, right, you go on paying your developers to inovate on a fixed schedule and budget... 10. "Paid software offers an open quid pro quo" - LYING BULLSHIT! like because the open-ness of open software is so sneaky that even when it tells you exactly what you get, you can't be sure. And definitely corporate license agreements bring 100% clarity and performance guarantees. 11. "It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D" - Yes!!! and that is why companies should exist. Open source does not mean that wolfram won't sell licenses and make money $$$. In fact, the author has already assured us that wolfram developers are the best, the most unified, hard-boring-working, coherent, inovative people to be found. So regardless of the sourcing, they'd be dominant in the market, right? So what's the problem? 12. "Bad design is expensive" - INSULTING BULLSHIT! Soooo... open source == bad design and you == good design? ya... And designs hidden behind a closed source wall are never, ever bad, right?