Open source is amazing. It's more than good enough to stand people writing snarky hot takes to increase their blog viewership. It just turns out that the econo

Open source is amazing. It's more than good enough to stand people writing snarky hot takes to increase their blog viewership. It just turns out that the economics of open source aren't necessarily a good fit for every use case. It's just not going to win everywhere for every user. I'll give you an example: computer algebra and graphing. Open source we have maxima (and wxmaxima). It is.... well weird but highly functional. It crashes from time to time but when it's not crashing you can do a lot with it. Every plot has thousands of options and you sort of need to specify most of them to get anything that looks half-decent. For some reason I don't fully understand you have to specify gnuplot options as well as maxima options sometimes but it's nice that it supports both of them. It's an absolute labour of love by the team who develop it. Paid for there is Mathematica. If you're a student it's like 75 bucks a year but if you're trying to use it in industry it's nearly 4 grand. Per user per year. It can do basically the same sort of thing as maxima but the graphs look amazing out of the box, the options aren't weird, there is support etc etc. Now here's the thing: Maxima is much better than Mathematica at certain things. And it's free. But it's really weird and some simple things are hard (like just graphing 2 2-d plots on the same axis) until you get the hang of it. And it's sort of lispy which I like but is weird for many people.