
Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source - halirutan
https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/
======
undecisive
Feels like trolling to me. I suspect this was posted a day late.

As he mentions, there are lots of projects that counter his claims. Linux
kernel. Every Open Source high-level language ever. Red hat.

Wolfram isn't open source because they don't want it to be open source. And
you know what? They're allowed to do that! They don't need to justify that
decision, it's their decision to make.

Without resorting to "they love money too much", I'll give them another,
slightly more honest reason: It's certainly not impossible, but open sourcing
an established project is hard. Managing a community of contributors AND a
community of users is hard. Keeping a steady stream of revenue while you make
the transition is haaaaarrrd. Maintaining all the values that he's mentioned
while still keeping all your contributors and community happy: HARD.

And if the cost:value ratio is wrong, you don't do it. And if you have lots of
other hard problems to solve, adding one more hard problem with fractional
value is silly.

Yes, we would love it to be OSS. Maybe this was posted as a way of never
having to answer the question again. Just sad that it isn't a little more
honest an answer.

~~~
peterburkimsher
They are allowed to make it closed-source, and there's no shame in making
well-maintained commercial software. That's how business works.

What about when business fails though? Open-source projects never die; see the
forks and reused knowledge in projects such as ffmpeg, libav, iPodLinux,
Rockbox. For archiving purposes, open-source is tremendous.

I wish another kind of license were available, where software remains
commercial until the company closes down, but then becomes OSS rather than
abandonware.

~~~
halirutan
Your last sentence reminded me of an interview with the Ton Rosendaal, the
creator of Blender. He talks extensively about how Blender became OSS and not
abandonware. I highly encourage to watch the whole interview (you need at
least 5 mins to get used to his accent), but the important part starts around
minute 14

[https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg](https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg)

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jpatokal
_The very concept of unified computation has been largely led by Wolfram._

For "unified", try sandboxed, walled harden or evolutionary dead end. Just
look at this literal Hello World example:

GeoGraphics[Text[Style["Hello!", 150]], GeoRange -> World]

In any other language, if I wanted to write some text on a graphic, I would
find a routine to load an image into memory and another to render text into
that memory. That's genuinely easy.

But in Wolfram's case, I'm apparently just supposed to know that there's
something called "GeoGraphics" that does this kind of thing, that the text
goes in a Style[] block (what?), and "GeoRange -> World" is how you tell it to
create a worldmap as a background. WTF. And don't tell me "read the docs",
because even if I found this, it wouldn't help me much with the rest:

[http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/GeoGraphics.htm](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/GeoGraphics.htm)

~~~
codeulike
That's not really fair criticism. The Mathematica approach to things is very
different to most other platforms. Have a look at some of the maths stuff and
symbolic manipulation stuff, that's the core that it was built out from.

~~~
jpatokal
Sure, I'll buy that Mathematica has its niche in (surprise!) math, but that's
very different from the friendly article's claim that Wolfram has a superior
approach to, well, everything:

 _Wolfram’s vision for computation is much more profound—to unify and automate
computation across computational fields, application areas, user types,
interfaces and deployments._

They even mention blockchain further down!

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wjnc
For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm
mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left
me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a
user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was
prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.

~~~
ssivark
Honestly, it's time we all put our money where our mouths are. A
hobbyist/individual license for Mathematica's desktop version is $170/year (or
$335 for a forever license to the current version). If we really value our
time, convenience and happiness, paying for software which we consider awesome
should be a no-brainer. Heck, that's not even 1% of annual rent for someone
living in the Bay Area. Of course, this comment is overly broad, and doesn't
apply directly to people living in areas with lower cost of living or
purchasing power (I grew up in India, so I understand the disparity).

I think Mathematica is quite fantastic (took me some time to understand it's
patterns). I don't use it currently because 1) A lot of my current work is
numerical and not symbolic -- for which Mathematica isn't great; so I use
Python/Julia 2) From a long term perspective, I wouldn't want to invest a
large fraction of my personal computing efforts into a proprietary single
point of failure.

TBH, with regards to paying for software, my psychological motivation is still
a work in progress (so the comments above are directed at myself as much as at
others), but I'm trying to build a habit of doing it more -- especially to
support free software. I care about computing too much -- I would hate to look
back on this twenty years later and rue the loss of computing freedom because
we were too stingy to invest a hundred bucks a year in the appropriate places.

~~~
wjnc
Aren't there two seperate discussions? 1. Paying something for the
contribution of others that offer their product for free (OSS) and 2. Paying
for and using proprietary software according to the licenses as offered by the
licensee. Mathematica falls under 2 and is obviously totally allowed to pursue
any pricing scheme they find acceptable. We just happen to think that leads to
a lower than optimal rate of acceptance, which is a societal loss but Wolframs
good right. Given Wolframs love of I and there being two I's in prIcIng, he
must have written about his motivations somewhere.

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mythz
This is just a PR piece to justify to their customers why they're staying
closed source.

The obvious reason is that they'd make a lot less revenue if it were OSS/free.
They're right that there's several business models around OSS that have
negative side-effects and that just charging for software is the more
transparent quid pro quo transaction.

It's ok to sell software, but they should just be transparent about it.

~~~
hatmatrix
I have no skin in the game, but I'll drop in my 2 cents. This may be a PR
piece or someone who's had this conversation a countless number of times and
wanted to lay it out in a single place.

The points seem mostly fair, though I would argue what he argues is "not
possible" with an free or open source model is that it's "more difficult" to
coordinate.

As an example, R is my go-to language, but the function arguments and style
can be vastly different from function to function or package to package. Here
I have found MATLAB to be more consistent in this regard. Python's kind of a
mix - the core of Python is like one language and Numpy, Pandas another, but
it does reflect the semi-independent management of these projects.

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vbuwivbiu
Linux is an example of an open source project with centralized design &
management and a unified vision.

Mathematica is a brilliant product, and more people would use it if it was
open source but it's ok that's it not.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
An OS kernel is a bounded problem, it abstracts hardware, enforces some
security constraints, and allows user programs to run. So it's not really that
hard to have a consensus of what Linux should do.

Linux also has the (unique to it) idea that the kernel and the rest of the OS
are not the same thing. There is no other integration point than the ABI for
userspace.

And OTOH, Linux userspace is ridiculously de-centralized. There's competing
distros, init systems, C runtimes, memory allocators, filesystems, etc.

And that's not even taking into account the absolute chaos of the Linux
desktop.

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alexibm
"fall madly in love!" with GAP (Computer Algebra System)

"9.0 Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market". You have to
have some balls to say that. Major mathematical libraries used in HPC are OSS.

~~~
coldtea
> _" 9.0 Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market". You have
> to have some balls to say that. Major mathematical libraries used in HPC are
> OSS._

And most of them are copies of age old Fortran stuff. Linux itself is a UNIX
clone. Gnome/KDE started as Windows clones. Where's the "tech innovation" in
that?

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> Linux itself is a UNIX clone

I think Linux is a prime example of innovation. Yes, it first started as a
UNIX clone, then basically took over and killed all competition, starting with
x86 and then practically all other platforms, with very specific exceptions.

What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new
technologies you can imagine in an operating system. And if some cool tech
cannot be implemented in Linux for design reasons (e.g. a microkernel or a
unikernel), a separate project is started.

~~~
coldtea
> _What used to be a UNIX clone decades ago is now a testbed of all new
> technologies you can imagine in an operating system._

But most of them are still copies of FreeBSD, Solaris, and Plan9 stuff.
Something particularly innovative in Linux?

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
The article admits:

> Open source often does create ecosystems that encourage many small-scale
> innovations, but while bolder innovations do widely exist at the early
> experimental stages, they often fail to be refined to the point of
> usefulness in large-scale adoption.

You can argue that, for example, KVM is a clone of something else. However,
it's because of not stopping at an early stage KVM is now a mature and
insanely popular technology.

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eMerzh
It's me or a lot of those points don't explain anything? I totally get they
don't want to open source it as a company but don't try to give false reason
for it.

It's not because it's open source that you can't have quality, central design,
or good documentation.

~~~
r3bl
It's not like anyone can push code to your project once you open source it,
you're still the gatekeeper that decides which PR gets accepted and which one
does not.

I could understand the argument that sifting through the pull requests would
take them too much time that they could spend doing something else, but at
least 8/12 of these could be solved by... you know, properly maintaining an
open source project.

The article leads me to the conclusion that they have no intention of letting
the community drive the company, and I could totally understand that. I don't
see how any of the listed reasons could prevent them from making their code
source-available without indicating an open source license.

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timkam
Isn't the blog post facilitating the types of open vs. closed source
discussions we should stop having as a community? Very little (or nothing) of
what McLoone introduces as "reasons" cannot be achieved with an OS approach.
In the end, it's a business choice someone has made a long time ago and
McLoone is now arguing backwards.

~~~
halirutan
I'm not even sure, why this blog post was necessary in the first place. No one
argues that a company needs revenue to pay employees and WRI is trying to
maximize its profit. That is absolutely fine. However, claiming that OSS
cannot achieve great and well-designed software, just to cover the true
reasons is simply wrong. Maybe someone should remind WRI that they use Qt,
Cairo, Pango, OpenCV and many more OSS libraries under the hood. Qt, in
particular, is almost as old as Mathematica itself when the information on
Wikipedia is correct.

~~~
pilchardbreath
He acknowledges that: "As I said at the start, the open-source model can work
very well in smaller, self-contained subsets of computation where small teams
can focus on local design issues. Indeed, the Wolfram Technology stack makes
use of and contributes to a number of excellent open-source libraries for
specialized tasks, such as..." and lists some

------
m0zg
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it!" \-- Upton Sinclair

Quite literally, in this case.

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qwerty456127
It's because they want to sell if tor money. Not bad or good (although
unreasonably expensive), just simple as this.

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tluyben2
I think control and making money are not bad reasons to keep something closed
source. I would like to see products going open source when the product is
discontinued or, something I have been thinking about, when you made enough
money for past and future to fullfil goals. For Wolfram that seems a point
reached years ago, but then again, Wolfram his goals are not clear for the
future, so you don't know when that part is satisfied. So I see his point and
think it's valid.

Like others have said here, if I were Wolfram, I would make it free for
personal use and then price it depending on the company size and revenue (like
some game engines do). I mean 345 euros for Home Edition is really too much
imho; I understand the power and reach of the product, but wouldn't it be
better to get more people dependent on it so they try to push it at their
jobs/companies?

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anonlastname
Interesting that money is not even on this list

~~~
pilchardbreath
Its on the list twice - 10 Paid software offers an open quid pro quo 11 It
takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D »

~~~
anonlastname
Those are not "because it allows us to get more profit." They are arguing that
non-free Mathematica is completely in the best interest of their users. Of
course it's not. At the end of the day, Sagemath is there for everybody to use
and a person can't even use Mathematica unless they're connected to a
university. They've sabotaged it with legal barriers and DRM.

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oaiey
.NET and the languages C# and VisualBasic.NET are open source (definitely not
free software) but tightly developed by one central R&D. I find the second
argument especially weak. You can be completely open source (and probably even
free) without giving up any control over your distribution.

~~~
mythz
They're only central R&D because MS employ most of the paid dev resources
working on it and no one would use any forks except from MS (or possibly
Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing resources in
maintaining a fork) so there's no risk of fragmentation.

That definitely doesn't apply to all projects, you can look at the successful
forks of Oracle's OSS acquired products.

If the OSS'ed code-base is valuable, you've just given a open invitation to
all your competitors to create their own competing forks.

~~~
noblethrasher
> or possibly Google, but they wouldn't ratify MS's platforms by investing
> resources in maintaining a fork.

While they're not maintaining a fork, it's worth noting that the _head_ of the
ECMA C# standards committee is, in fact, a prominent Google employee.

~~~
oaiey
"prominent" ... What a modest description :)

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billfruit
Atleast they could include the source, with a paid purchase. Many software
like vxworks will give you the source, which you can yourself rebuild, if you
pay for a license. More commercial software should be bundling source code
with paid licenses.

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esjeon
While using Mathematica, you don't need to go out to fetch some random 3rd
party tools, because most components are already built into it. What makes it
better is that combining those components is well streamlined, and there's
little need for costly plumbing.

Paywall does suck, but someone gotta curate all those shits. Mathematica is a
good platform not only because of some advanced algorithms built into it, but
also because of the curation from Wolfram. Curating software component is one
of the least fun job in the world, and any entities who do it properly should
be paid for the sake longevity of their roles.

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notfromhere
tl;dr It's not open source because they like money

~~~
sjfbo
Thank you, you saved some of my time.

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Golfkid2Gadfly
Because, open source is more about intellectual property rights, than about
architecture and control. From the outside looking in, it appears that you
have made some decisions made on some bad assumptions of what open source
software has to be. I could argue your points one by one, but I think it’s
more important to address the key factor here: The market is inherently
distrustful of closed technology systems.

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thrillgore
Does anyone remember his book "A New Kind of Science" which was a really
discredited, unoriginal, hack-fraudish, non-scientifically vetted essay on
cellular automata?

~~~
matt4077
Still better than anything you or I will ever write.

~~~
WkndTriathlete
Are you sure he wrote it? Rumor has it that Wolfram had his grad
students/postdocs write Mathematica and is essentially trampling on their
backs making money off of it now.

