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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.

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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.

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

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