Interesting. I read that as a future-looking statement, justifying the past as an indicator of the future.

Consider the statement "I don't think I could have survived if I was forced to cycle to work every day!" While I'm not saying it outright, I'm making it clear that tomorrow I will not be cycling to work.

At the end, he almost does say it outright: "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." In other words, don't hold your breath for it to happen in the future - it doesn't fit with our vision.

When he says ("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") is not that Wolfram can't be made open source nominally (e.g. "we make it, we control development completely, I call the shots, but it's just under GPL" for example).

His emphasis is that Wolfram was not, and in his opinion will never be, a good fit for the "FOSS development model" (what I call "bazaar-style" in my comment above).

Considering that he thinks that Wolfram couldn't be developed in the "FOSS development model", and that he things that model is not suited for Wolfram, it's also unlikely that he will open source it either. Since there's no much purpose in open sourcing something that doesn't benefit from that model. You just give your product away for free (beer/freedom) with no benefit for either the product or you.

Keep in mind that "FOSS development model" does not equal "bazaar-style" development. Case in point: the *BSDs follow a more cathedral-style development model. I fully agree with the author's first point ("A coherent vision requires centralized design"). Reusing my previous example, BSDs are shipped as operating systems, not a kernel and a hodge podge of packages. There's a bunch of things that are half assed on Linux distributions and I partially blame the bazaar style. It's not that it's a bad way to develop software, it's just that it's hard to make sense of the whole mess that comes with the bazaar.

>Keep in mind that "FOSS development model" does not equal "bazaar-style" development. Case in point: the BSDs follow a more cathedral-style development model.*

I think it does (equal "bazaar-style" development).

Else it's not a product with a "FOSS development model", but merely a product with a "FOSS license".

But he talks of "FOSS development model" (as opposed to "FOSS license" or "FOSS business model").

>Reusing my previous example, BSDs are shipped as operating systems, not a kernel and a hodge podge of packages.

For their core (kernel + userland) yes. But on top they are still as much "a hodge podge of packages", with uncoordinated development and releases as Linux (e.g. the desktop environments, applications, window managers, compilers, app servers, etc -- it's just the kernel and basic UNIX userland that's coherent in BSDs).