Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

Most of these are about wanting control over the design of the software - but releasing their code doesn&#x27;t have any impact on that - I don&#x27;t get it? Java is open source - Oracle still tightly controls and manages the design of Java.<p>For example &#x27;Bad design is expensive&#x27; - how releasing your source lead to bad design? That&#x27;s a complete non-sequitur.

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.<p>Wolfram products are very highly priced, even much more so for the Indian market.<p>Indian science and engineering colleges are usually very poorly funded save some IITs and premier provincial universities.<p>There is no way in hell these colleges could ever have afforded MATLAB or Wolfram products.<p>C and ForTran were taught at science institues- even at the very best ones.<p>Students only learned this.<p>By the year 2018, all of science universities of India fully switched to Python for Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. majors.<p>They now teach NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, etc.<p>They totally skipped Wolfram and Mathworks products.<p>Why do I say &quot;skipped&quot;? 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.<p>They went straight from ForTran and C to Python ecosystem.<p>Now, the market is flooded with thousands of core science grads with Python skills who have never worked with MATLAB or Mathematica.<p>They are the losers in their models.

1 - 11: $$<p>12. Doesn&#x27;t want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast<p>I&#x27;ve had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.

As a huge FOSS guy, I have to say -- this list is <i>excellent.</i><p>I think where this debate&#x2F;discussion goes off the rails is a lack of appreciation for every aspect of things in their place.<p>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.<p>But also, I also do not believe that supporting it requires full and complete buy-in, the way some people do religion. I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s THERE, and ALSO not everyone has to do it. This is not hypocritical or even conflicting.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>Because I don&#x27;t think they are so stupid this wasn&#x27;t a conscious decision on their part.

If he had said &quot;It isn&#x27;t open source because it&#x27;s ours and we don&#x27;t want it to be&quot; that would have much more integrity than this.

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.

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&#x27;d give it a try. It wasn&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to say the Python ecosystem is far superior for all it&#x27;s flaws. Sure the documentation is all over the place, there&#x27;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 <i>right now</i>, at least I have options to switch things out or even fix the code. Wolfram has a lot of lofty ideas that hasn&#x27;t been delivered on.<p>13) Try to do everything, but poorly<p>But seriously how can you build a unified model of computation, when we&#x27;re still figuring things out? I just tried jax yesterday, their approach to jit &amp; automatic vectorization is really interesting. Wolfram, do you even have a jit? This article gives me less respect for the Wolfram Tech, they&#x27;re building off the shoulders of giants trying to package it up in some nice soft serve product--it&#x27;s not a good look to criticize something your building your empire off of.

Their more recent post titled &quot;Six Reasons Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source&quot;[1] is even more cringey.<p>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&#x27;t that competent, which is insultiong at best.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wolfram.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wolfram.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;six-reasons-why-the-wolf...</a>

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.

I understand Mr. Wolfram&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t, lacking his admittedly ingenius leadership, it will be lost to obscurity at best. That would be a shame for humanity.

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.<p>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.<p>The article is a typical critique of open source generally, and one can debate how true or false each point is, but it&#x27;s not relevant to the real reasons. It&#x27;s just a smokescreen over &quot;we&#x27;d think we&#x27;ll make more money this way&quot;.

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.<p>The article didn’t come across well. They don’t need to justify being closed source.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;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.

&gt; Paid software offers an open quid pro quo<p>This section points out a valid problem with business models based on open source, but closing the source and requiring payment doesn&#x27;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&#x2F;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.

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.

The only point here that _may_ be considered valid is #5: Crowd sourced decisions may be bad for you.<p>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&#x27;s still lots of issues there (like async). However just because there&#x27;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.<p>And of course there&#x27;s successful models like VSCode, which manages to be _mostly_ open, but all the &quot;cool parts&quot; (like Copilot) are still not possible to reproduce with the provided source alone.<p>Many ways to open source your code and still have people pay for it!

Wolfram isn&#x27;t open source because Wolfram (the man) is an ego maniac and a control freak. This isn&#x27;t an adhominem - some men are just that way.

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.

Firstly I think if Wolfram wants to keep Mathematica closed source, that&#x27;s his choice and I have no problem with it.<p>But, doesn&#x27;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 &quot;beautiful&quot; architecture to bind it all together.

Well, that&#x27;s a cancelled subscription from me.<p>I have no problem with them not being Open Source, but these arguments are all orthogonal to being Open Source.<p>There is a valid argument for not being Open Source: &quot;We think a proprietary program with a monthly license fee is the best business model for our company and product.&quot;<p>You say that, I respect you. You bring a bunch of bad arguments, I lose trust.

This is just the usual &quot;proprietary software is higher quality, we swear&quot;.<p>Accurately voicing my thoughts on this would probably go against the HN guidelines, so I&#x27;ll just let this sentence from the article speak for itself:<p>&gt;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.<p>Well, good luck with that.

&gt; 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.<p>I actually think at a minimum that this isn&#x27;t true, but it&#x27;s also possible that the complete opposite is true.<p>OSS has maintainers who know what they&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s and RFC&#x27;s) to &quot;anchor&quot; all decisions through them, while still trying to scale the work by having other people do as much of the work as possible.<p>However, I would say that potentially the even the reverse of what the author is saying is true in same cases.<p>&gt; design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task<p>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&#x27;s precisely because OSS is free and requires an extremely high degree of skill upon the maintainers that it&#x27;s able to eschew these kinds of office politics and deliver what they think is the &quot;best&quot; for the software.<p>Obviously some projects are better than others, but I think there&#x27;s a reason that OSS almost always tends to be of much higher quality than privately developed software. These &quot;self-assembling&quot; groups that organize along political boundaries of various product owners or managers is probably one thing that doesn&#x27;t help get the best ideas to find immediate traction.<p>Am I wrong about this?

Only relevant sentence: &quot;Salaries are a good motivation.&quot;<p>I feel sorry for the schlubs who have to write these corporate blogs.<p>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.

Quoting from the blog post.<p>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.<p>The problem with Wolfram Tech is the above objective can be done by doing one thing and is improving developer ergonomics.<p>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.<p>These problems are just since Mathematica is so old it didn&#x27;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&#x27;t see it achieving anything like that at all.

I think the question needs to be a bit more well formed for the answer written.<p>Does he mean &quot;why doesn&#x27;t Wolfram opensource all its stuff&quot;, or &quot;why not opensource and also take contributions from a community&quot;, or &quot;why is it that Wolfram is finding itself in a situation where there is no viable opensource competitor&quot;, or something else?<p>I believe there are some Google opensource projects where the source is open (and even a libre license), but it&#x27;s still presented as-is, with no real way for anyone outside Google to contribute.<p>There are other projects where there&#x27;s a clear corporate owner, but outside patches are accepted.<p>It&#x27;s not that I disagree with this post, but it&#x27;s very unclear what this person means by &quot;open source&quot;.<p>So in the most scathing of all critiques, I would summarize this post as &quot;not even wrong&quot;.

Claim number 9 might be right for the specific listed cases but it certainly isn&#x27;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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>In AI research, the common set of tools used by the community is open source (Tensorflow, Python, etc.)<p>In conclusion, interesting perspective, but it does not match mine at all.

(2019)<p>Interesting compared to this recent take: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wolfram.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wolfram.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;six-reasons-why-the-wolf...</a>

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.

I really think Wolfram missed a huge opportunity in mid 2000’s. They basically had the best interactive programming experience by far. Mathematica should&#x2F;could have been an essential tool for all data scientists. I still prefer Mathematica interface over Jupyter.

How is software growth like a plant? What are the nutrients (revenue&#x2F;volunteers)? The positive feedback loop (commits). The negative feedback loop (deprecations)?<p>Prusinkiewicz &amp; 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.<p>I wonder if it possible to map these terrains across all the Github projects?<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;algorithmicbotany.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;abop&#x2F;abop.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;algorithmicbotany.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;abop&#x2F;abop.pdf</a>

&quot;Free by side effect&quot;<p>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&#x27;s eventually going to starve to death. It&#x27;s unsustainable...<p>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&#x27;s closed source.

Wow, I&#x27;m supprised at all the false reasons, that are based on incorrect assumptions. For example, &quot;bad design is expensive&quot;, 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&#x27;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?

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&#x27;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&#x27;t be.<p>The other arguments are more acceptable: we want to make money and we think opening the source goes in the way. I don&#x27;t <i>like</i> it but I understand.

It seems like Facebook doesn&#x27;t have problem with releasing open source project [0] while keeping centralised control over it.<p>Why not just say they want to monetize it?<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;flow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;flow</a>

The clear example counter to his argument would be <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blender.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blender.org&#x2F;</a>

Releasing an open source doesn&#x27;t mean you have to accept contributions. You don&#x27;t have to be an open source project.<p>And as an open source project it is fair to say you don&#x27;t want a contribution because, you can&#x27;t foresee future implications, and you don&#x27;t think the problem it addresses is something you have time to form an opinion on.

seriously on point 9? &quot;Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t know where to begin with this alone let alone the rest of the diatripe.<p>Closed works for them, their product and their vision, but keep it in scope of what works for you or doesn&#x27;t, not attack an alternative model because you feel superior...

Multiple comments here talking about releasing the source code, as if it&#x27;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.

According to this list, shouldn&#x27;t Windows Mobile have been the fiercest competitor of iOS and not Android?

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&#x2F;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.

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.

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&amp;V really the target market? If so, I don’t see how “math” is the major draw.

There&#x27;s been a slow but noticeable march of open-source things replacing closed-source things over time.<p>[Open source] software will eat the world, and all that

at this point the ecological niche of open source computation &#x2F; 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?

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

That&#x27;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&#x27;ll stay a language that most company will never want to use.

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.

10 and 11 are really the only reasons.

Why should they need to explain that?

TLDR: some types of software needs more than programming.<p>omitted TLDR: some of the above can only be done by paying people money to do them. Company needs income for that.<p>omitted exibit: why haven&#x27;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)

Not very convincing, I&#x27;d say.

#13 - Customer support

Needs (2019)

(sorry for the cheap meme, but..)<p><i>linux enters the chat</i>

What a <i>jackhole</i>!<p>A study in basically why open source works and is always better - than crappy corporations that would write a blog like this.<p>1. &quot;A coherent vision requires centralized design&quot; - BULLSHIT! you can do open source with a centralized or whatever kind of governance you want.<p>2. &quot;High-level languages need more design than low-level languages&quot; - INSULTING BULLSHIT! maybe true, but who said open source can&#x27;t handle the &quot;more&quot; design required? I can&#x27;t think of a single open source design with, say 30 million lines of code, that is &quot;designed&quot; ok.<p>3. &quot;You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields&quot; - BULLSHIT! so, open source is <i>never ever</i> multidisiplinary? from disparate fields? This is EXACTLY why it should be open! How do you even presume to do this by <i>excluding</i> all the diverse stakeholders?<p>4. &quot;Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too&quot; - 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.<p>5. &quot;Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you&quot; - 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&#x27;t they also more often be good?<p>6. &quot;Our developers work for you, not just themselves&quot; - TOTAL BULLSHIT! they 100% work for YOU not me. I&#x27;d love to help. For free! but I can&#x27;t because a) I don&#x27;t work for you and b) if I did, you wouldn&#x27;t let me do what I want.<p>7. &quot;Unified computation requires unified design&quot; - 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&#x27;d be <i>exactly</i> 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?<p>8. &quot;Unified representation requires unified design&quot; - BULLSHIT LAZY COPY OF PREVIOUS ARGUMENT!<p>9. &quot;Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market&quot; - BULLSHIT! WHAT! inovation has always been linked to coloboration and sharing. You can&#x27;t inovate in an echo chamber. Yes, right, you go on paying your developers to inovate on a fixed schedule and budget...<p>10. &quot;Paid software offers an open quid pro quo&quot; - 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&#x27;t be sure. And definitely corporate license agreements bring 100% clarity and performance guarantees.<p>11. &quot;It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&amp;D&quot; - Yes!!! and that is why companies should exist. Open source does not mean that wolfram won&#x27;t sell licenses and make money $$$. In fact, the author has already assured us that wolfram developers are the <i>best</i>, the most <i>unified</i>, <i>hard-boring-working</i>, <i>coherent</i>, <i>inovative</i> people to be found. So regardless of the sourcing, they&#x27;d be dominant in the market, right? So what&#x27;s the problem?<p>12. &quot;Bad design is expensive&quot; - INSULTING BULLSHIT! Soooo... open source == bad design and you == good design? ya... And designs hidden behind a closed source wall are <i>never, ever</i> bad, right?

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

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.