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I'm confused why you would say that. FTA: > Ultimately every named construct or concept in pure mathematics needs to have a place in our symbolic language. Th

• dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 12y ago
  We would want to do that for the same reasons that people write textbooks. Mathematica was not designed for building applications like Java or C++, but as a tool for research and learning. To that end, Mathematica is well designed and the documentation is exceptionally curated, just like, for example, a physics textbook, which also encodes public knowledge in a private (copyrighted) manner. The mathematicians and software engineers at Wolfram Research should be compensated for their efforts, just like the authors and publishers of textbooks. And I'd much rather pay for my textbooks than see them filled with ads. As a lover of mathematics I'm happy to see people writing and thinking about the ideas in this post. It's a noble pursuit.
  • igravious 12y ago
    Your analogy textbook <-> mathematical software does not hold. Think it through. It's not a copyright issue. I can explain in detail my point of view if you like. It's not a noble pursuit when the gain is too one-sided. Wolfram and his company would accrue to much material advantage at the expense of an open and public mathematical discourse. This much is plain to see, watch out for rhetoric of the kind on display in that post!