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Comment by vtail | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your second point - I don't have a horse in that race, other than tremendously enjoying my personal license that I pay for out of my pocket; but I found their arguments[1] quite reasonable. I think there was an HN discussion about this some time ago.

[1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...

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I find the arguments confused and lacking. Many of those arguments conflate “open source” with “community driven”. Rarely did they make a compelling case as to how availability of the source code would hurt the customers.

And many, many amazing open source teams have demonstrated that even including community driven design in some cases does not hamper the quality of the product. Look at Apple and Swift, or Rust, as examples.

I read their arguments as “we do not know how to engage with a community effort because it’s not in our company DNA” under the facade of supposedly legitimate reasons.

Swift is a great example, but don't forget that is essentially funded by Apple. It would look very different if it would be a true community effort.

Rust I'm not very familiar with: how much of their funding is dependent on Mozilla, at least for the core developer(s)?

Also, a language + a standard library has a (much!) smaller surface comparing to Wolfram's vision.

They have funding; that’s great! Exactly what I’m saying is that these projects manage to be community run (to some extent) while still remaining successful.

If Wolfram’s reason to not publish the source code is that they believe they would no longer have a business model, they should list that as the One Reason, not 12 gaslighting reasons.

Well, they clearly think their model works for them. If you think otherwise, it's on you to convince them that they should change their model, or start your own effort if you think it will benefit humanity. I don't think they necessarily need to "defend" their business choices.

You're right, they don't need to defend it. But they shouldn't put out reasons that don't make sense. They ought to just put nothing out at all and operate as normal.

I don't care what works for them. I care what works for society.

Mozilla funds a few things. Some stuff is funded by other companies. Mozilla pays the most folks to work full time, but the amount is tiny compared to the overall set of teams, let alone contributors.

Thanks Steve for the answer! HN is an amazing place where a random comment asking a question about Rust can get an answer from a core developer. I hope we will always keep it that way.

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