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Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by mythz on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @04:02AM (#19561647)
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.

Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by hatmatrix on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @04:34AM (#19561768)
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.