Many would wonder why isn’t Wolfram tech open source? Jon McLoone, Director of Technical Communication & Strategy, shares his opinions on free and open-source software with a dozen reasons why Wolfram Tech isn’t:

Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.

At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.

Much of this blog could be summed up with two answers: (1) free, open-source software can be very good, but it isn’t good at doing what we are trying to do; with a large fraction of the reason being (2) 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.

I came up with 12 reasons why I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. I would be interested to hear your views in the comments section below the blog.

1. A coherent vision requires centralized design »
2. High-level languages need more design than low-level languages »
3. You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields »
4. Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too »
5. Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you »
6. Our developers work for you, not just themselves »
7. Unified computation requires unified design »
8. Unified representation requires unified design »
9. Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market »
10. Paid software offers an open quid pro quo »
11. It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D »
12. Bad design is expensive »

For full article, read here: https://wolfr.am/CvZWy5p6