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>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? [...] how

by jasode 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? [...] how releasing your source lead to bad design? The way to interpret his argument is to imagine an alternate past history where Mathematica was open source from the beginning and how that would have lead to an inferior product. He wrote: >[...] I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. So instead of thinking they can just go ahead and open source what they have today and everything would be just fine, we need to consider how game theory would have played out in an alternate universe where they tried FOSS model from the beginning. Maybe his argument is still flawed but to at least entertain his scenario, let's study other projects and compare: - open source GIMP is considered very good -- but also is several years behind closed-source Adobe Photoshop in features - OpenCAD, OpenSCAD not as full-featured as proprietary Autodesk, SolidWorks, etc - LibreOffice has less features the MS Office - Code::Blocks and Eclipse as IDE for C++ coding not as good as MS Visual Studio - OpenStack less features than AWS - SageMath has less symbolic computing features than Wolfram Mathematica To counterbalance the above, we can try to identify open source projects that are equal or superior to proprietary solutions: - LibOpus is superior algorithm to Fraunhofer FDK AAC - Linux (server) is comparable or superior to MS Windows (Server). - GCC, Clang comparable to Microsoft "cl.exe" compiler. Is there a pattern to the above? It seems like a combination of : - big complex software with lots of features - GUI ... often means that open-source collaboration model falls behind the proprietary commercial offerings. Why? So if Wolfram tried to open-source Mathematica from the beginning of its history, a different proprietary XYZ software may have outcompeted them. E.g. the salaried programmers working on today's Mathematica wouldn't have worked on the open-source Mathematica for free because they would have been at XYZ Corporation. In that alternate timeline, we'd complain today that "Mathematica isn't as good as XYZ"

derefr 5y ago
> Is there a pattern to the above? It seems like a combination of [a] big complex software with lots of features, [and a] GUI... often means that open-source collaboration model falls behind the proprietary commercial offerings. Why? Interaction Design (IxD) isn’t something that can be done piecemeal; it needs to be done top-down, with an overarching vision, to achieve its ends (an intuitive design.) Intuition comes from obvious implicit structure, where you can easily “get into the mind of” the designer, discover their mental model, and then use it to predict how other features will work. If there’s no single designer (or very-tightly-constraining design document) then there’s no unified mental model to learn, and so no intuition. And there are relatively-few professional designers in the open-source community. It’s easy and low-friction for a professional programmer to “scratch their own itch” by implementing just one little change in a piece of software, and by that means, FOSS software’s source code quality can be improved piecemeal. But it’s both difficult (you have to re-do everything at once for it to help) and high-friction (hard to convince the software maintainers to accept the change) to contribute a design change to FOSS software. So useful FOSS software design changes are almost impractical (unless the stars align); and so professional designers just don’t bother to even try to take part in the community. So instead, FOSS software just tends to languish without any unified design vision ever being applied to it. (Or with a bad, arbitrary, and unintuitive design vision being contributed at some point by some inexperienced designer, and being accepted because the maintainers are all programmers with no sense for IxD themselves.) There’s also the fact that a lot of IxD needs to be informed by data — e.g. user workflow studies — that cost money to run; and FOSS projects don’t tend to have the budget for this, or don’t tend to see it as a priority for spending what budget they do have, since they have no “design advocate” on the team to ask for it.
vinsci 5y ago
More or extended features are not automatically a good thing for the users. Microsoft extended Kerberos with incompatible changes, re-published it under a diffeerent name, users lost open source benefits and became locked in to the Microsoft version, and the original developers were not provided with the changes. Microsoft did almost the same thing with Sun's Java when Microsoft made its incompatible version, despite Java being available in a free as in freedom version and at no cost. The four essential freedoms[1] might not make you rich, but they will keep providing you with true freedom. Wolfram Mathematica would be a more valuable contribution to the future of humankind, if the essential freedoms were guaranteed. [1] gnu.org The Free Software Definition: The four essential freedoms.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I think you're skipping the really big obvious answer, which isn't features or graphical interfaces: Money. Photoshop, Autodesk, Office, etc. are huge money makers, so they can throw developers and designers at improving things. Server Linux is largely driven by billion-dollar companies investing.
sudosysgen 5y ago
Probably the exception is Blender, which is a big, complex GUI with gobs of features and is very compétitive.
- anchpop 5y ago
  true, why is blender special? it was originally a closed source program with a small community that became open source later, but it’s evolved massively since then and become much more polished and easier to use, which virtually no open source project can say
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    KiCAD is another package that I think is fairly competitive at this point. It’s not going to kill Altium, but it’s improved greatly in the last 3 years.
    - bsder 5y ago
      I actually disagree and think Altium will, in fact, be Victim #001 of KiCad. The question becomes: "Is Altium <n> thousand dollars better than KiCad?" And a lot of the time the answer will now be "No." I already split my designs about 50/50 between Altium and KiCad--and that's before KiCad 6.0 which is imminent (6.0RC2 exists right now). 1) KiCad has one killer feature: it's cross platform. I would argue that this will, over time, kill anything that isn't. Mostly because "open a VM in the cloud and do all your work there" is becoming really common. 2) PCB software, by and large, doesn't need new features. PCB software does need features that work. Altium is infuriating with not killing bugs and introducing new ones every release. 3) Altium and bunch are basically blocking access to libraries without a subscription fee. That's going to erase Altium for use by small people. This drives me up a tree because it prevents me from sharing a design. KiCad will slowly but surely eat everything at the bottom and then start upwards--there's just simply no other decent alternative in the space.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        There is no design that I’ll ever do that KiCAD can’t handle. I get the sense that most of the commercial complex PCB (motherboards, phones, etc) are likely to stay Altium for a good long while. Is that not the case?
analog31 5y ago
I believe GUI is a huge part of it. My rationale is that sweating the details of the GUI actually requires a profound amount of work, that is not at the top of the list of things that programmers enjoy working on. The the only way to get it done is to hire an army of well paid programmers to do it. And things like office and graphics software are nothing without GUI. Second, some software builds on a body of proprietary domain knowledge that someone happens to own. I'd put mechanical CAD in that category. Probably the symbolic computing technology of Mathematica as well. In some cases, users of specialized engineering software actually put up with horrifying user interfaces because the software vendor has a lock on the domain knowledge. The successes of open source include anything without a user interface, such as the infrastructure of the universe, and non domain specific programming tools.
- maeil 5y ago
  Agreed that GUI is a huge part of it, but I'd say for a different reason. There are almost no UI/UX designers contributing to open source projects. At the very least the ratio of them to programmers is incredibly low, far lower than at any company whose main product depends heavily on its GUI like office or graphics software. OSS GUIs are exactly what you get if you leave it completely up to an army of pure programmers (whether well-paid or not).
nikoraisu 5y ago
And in this alternate past history, how would they have generated an income? I think your clarification is spot-on, and the debate around whether they could or would have been out-competed is an interesting one, but fundamentally they need to be able to generate revenue somehow. I totally get open-source for libraries/components/building blocks/etc, and strategies like “commoditise your complements” have been mentioned elsewhere. But I’m struggling to see how open-sourcing the actual end-user product isn’t just literally giving away everything for free?
lobocinza 5y ago
Did any of these open-source projects that lag behind had a budget that at least was of the same order of magnitude of their proprietary counterparts? I don't think so. OBS is another counterexample that is heavy on GUI and absolutely superior to similar solutions (where they don't just fork it and hide it). Proprietary and open-source modes share the same challenges. 1. Developers need incentives and it has to be sustainable. Money is the biggest of them but reputation, fun and self-realization also matters. 2. Organization and scale. A team of experts supported by staff can do a lot more than a single developer. But a large corporation is inefficient and can fail to deliver. 3. Momentum. It's difficult for a software to compete with large established softwares like AutoDesk, MS Office and Photoshop even if delivers the same features and performance.
- jasode 5y ago
  >Did any of these open-source projects that lag behind had a budget that at least was of the same order of magnitude of their proprietary counterparts? I don't think so. No they didn't and that's why I put those lagging open-source projects as examples to make readers imagine that an alternate-history-open-source Mathematica may have lagged behind like them too. I think you lost track of the argument put forth by this thread's essay from Jon McLoone of Wolfram. Your emphasis about "no big budget" actually supports his listed benefits of the paid model in: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/#six-our-developers-work-for-you-not-just-themselves https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... Again, when he wrote : >[...] I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. ... he's saying you wouldn't have the comprehensive Mathematica product we see today with the open source model. Perhaps the histories of how GIMP/OpenCAD/SageMath evolved supports his point that Mathematica was correct in not choosing their open-source model?
nathias 5y ago
If you include other succesfull open source projects, like Blender, the pattern is no longer there ...
- otterley 5y ago
  A lot of “rules” are general rules, many of which have exceptions. These are not laws of the universe.
  - nathias 5y ago
    my point was you can get any rules if you cherry pick examples ...

by jasode 5y ago

derefr 5y ago

> Is there a pattern to the above? It seems like a combination of [a] big complex software with lots of features, [and a] GUI... often means that open-source collaboration model falls behind the proprietary commercial offerings. Why? Interaction Design (IxD) isn’t something that can be done piecemeal; it needs to be done top-down, with an overarching vision, to achieve its ends (an intuitive design.) Intuition comes from obvious implicit structure, where you can easily “get into the mind of” the designer, discover their mental model, and then use it to predict how other features will work. If there’s no single designer (or very-tightly-constraining design document) then there’s no unified mental model to learn, and so no intuition. And there are relatively-few professional designers in the open-source community. It’s easy and low-friction for a professional programmer to “scratch their own itch” by implementing just one little change in a piece of software, and by that means, FOSS software’s source code quality can be improved piecemeal. But it’s both difficult (you have to re-do everything at once for it to help) and high-friction (hard to convince the software maintainers to accept the change) to contribute a design change to FOSS software. So useful FOSS software design changes are almost impractical (unless the stars align); and so professional designers just don’t bother to even try to take part in the community. So instead, FOSS software just tends to languish without any unified design vision ever being applied to it. (Or with a bad, arbitrary, and unintuitive design vision being contributed at some point by some inexperienced designer, and being accepted because the maintainers are all programmers with no sense for IxD themselves.) There’s also the fact that a lot of IxD needs to be informed by data — e.g. user workflow studies — that cost money to run; and FOSS projects don’t tend to have the budget for this, or don’t tend to see it as a priority for spending what budget they do have, since they have no “design advocate” on the team to ask for it.

vinsci 5y ago

More or extended features are not automatically a good thing for the users. Microsoft extended Kerberos with incompatible changes, re-published it under a diffeerent name, users lost open source benefits and became locked in to the Microsoft version, and the original developers were not provided with the changes. Microsoft did almost the same thing with Sun's Java when Microsoft made its incompatible version, despite Java being available in a free as in freedom version and at no cost. The four essential freedoms[1] might not make you rich, but they will keep providing you with true freedom. Wolfram Mathematica would be a more valuable contribution to the future of humankind, if the essential freedoms were guaranteed. [1] gnu.org The Free Software Definition: The four essential freedoms.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

I think you're skipping the really big obvious answer, which isn't features or graphical interfaces: Money. Photoshop, Autodesk, Office, etc. are huge money makers, so they can throw developers and designers at improving things. Server Linux is largely driven by billion-dollar companies investing.

sudosysgen 5y ago

Probably the exception is Blender, which is a big, complex GUI with gobs of features and is very compétitive.

anchpop 5y ago
true, why is blender special? it was originally a closed source program with a small community that became open source later, but it’s evolved massively since then and become much more polished and easier to use, which virtually no open source project can say
- sokoloff 5y ago
  KiCAD is another package that I think is fairly competitive at this point. It’s not going to kill Altium, but it’s improved greatly in the last 3 years.
  - bsder 5y ago
    I actually disagree and think Altium will, in fact, be Victim #001 of KiCad. The question becomes: "Is Altium <n> thousand dollars better than KiCad?" And a lot of the time the answer will now be "No." I already split my designs about 50/50 between Altium and KiCad--and that's before KiCad 6.0 which is imminent (6.0RC2 exists right now). 1) KiCad has one killer feature: it's cross platform. I would argue that this will, over time, kill anything that isn't. Mostly because "open a VM in the cloud and do all your work there" is becoming really common. 2) PCB software, by and large, doesn't need new features. PCB software does need features that work. Altium is infuriating with not killing bugs and introducing new ones every release. 3) Altium and bunch are basically blocking access to libraries without a subscription fee. That's going to erase Altium for use by small people. This drives me up a tree because it prevents me from sharing a design. KiCad will slowly but surely eat everything at the bottom and then start upwards--there's just simply no other decent alternative in the space.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      There is no design that I’ll ever do that KiCAD can’t handle. I get the sense that most of the commercial complex PCB (motherboards, phones, etc) are likely to stay Altium for a good long while. Is that not the case?

analog31 5y ago

I believe GUI is a huge part of it. My rationale is that sweating the details of the GUI actually requires a profound amount of work, that is not at the top of the list of things that programmers enjoy working on. The the only way to get it done is to hire an army of well paid programmers to do it. And things like office and graphics software are nothing without GUI. Second, some software builds on a body of proprietary domain knowledge that someone happens to own. I'd put mechanical CAD in that category. Probably the symbolic computing technology of Mathematica as well. In some cases, users of specialized engineering software actually put up with horrifying user interfaces because the software vendor has a lock on the domain knowledge. The successes of open source include anything without a user interface, such as the infrastructure of the universe, and non domain specific programming tools.

maeil 5y ago
Agreed that GUI is a huge part of it, but I'd say for a different reason. There are almost no UI/UX designers contributing to open source projects. At the very least the ratio of them to programmers is incredibly low, far lower than at any company whose main product depends heavily on its GUI like office or graphics software. OSS GUIs are exactly what you get if you leave it completely up to an army of pure programmers (whether well-paid or not).

nikoraisu 5y ago

And in this alternate past history, how would they have generated an income? I think your clarification is spot-on, and the debate around whether they could or would have been out-competed is an interesting one, but fundamentally they need to be able to generate revenue somehow. I totally get open-source for libraries/components/building blocks/etc, and strategies like “commoditise your complements” have been mentioned elsewhere. But I’m struggling to see how open-sourcing the actual end-user product isn’t just literally giving away everything for free?

lobocinza 5y ago

Did any of these open-source projects that lag behind had a budget that at least was of the same order of magnitude of their proprietary counterparts? I don't think so. OBS is another counterexample that is heavy on GUI and absolutely superior to similar solutions (where they don't just fork it and hide it). Proprietary and open-source modes share the same challenges. 1. Developers need incentives and it has to be sustainable. Money is the biggest of them but reputation, fun and self-realization also matters. 2. Organization and scale. A team of experts supported by staff can do a lot more than a single developer. But a large corporation is inefficient and can fail to deliver. 3. Momentum. It's difficult for a software to compete with large established softwares like AutoDesk, MS Office and Photoshop even if delivers the same features and performance.

jasode 5y ago
>Did any of these open-source projects that lag behind had a budget that at least was of the same order of magnitude of their proprietary counterparts? I don't think so. No they didn't and that's why I put those lagging open-source projects as examples to make readers imagine that an alternate-history-open-source Mathematica may have lagged behind like them too. I think you lost track of the argument put forth by this thread's essay from Jon McLoone of Wolfram. Your emphasis about "no big budget" actually supports his listed benefits of the paid model in: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/#six-our-developers-work-for-you-not-just-themselves https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... Again, when he wrote : >[...] I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. ... he's saying you wouldn't have the comprehensive Mathematica product we see today with the open source model. Perhaps the histories of how GIMP/OpenCAD/SageMath evolved supports his point that Mathematica was correct in not choosing their open-source model?

nathias 5y ago

If you include other succesfull open source projects, like Blender, the pattern is no longer there ...

otterley 5y ago
A lot of “rules” are general rules, many of which have exceptions. These are not laws of the universe.
- nathias 5y ago
  my point was you can get any rules if you cherry pick examples ...