Steve Jobs did that more than most, so did Thomas Edison, yet we venerate them for doing so. There must be a different reason people dislike Wolfram. He's obviously a brilliant guy, his premises make a lot of sense and he's been much more successful business wise than most mathematicians. I'd think he'd be a poster child for HN, not an object of hate.
Is there a particularly egregious example that we can link to (since the book is on line)? Or maybe someone has an annotated version which has better references to prior work?