Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

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If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show. I know of similar software where if the main developer were to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the mathematical understanding of the problem.

Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's hard to compete with Mathematica which is ~$1000 for a professional license (very reasonable in the industry compared to most others) or free on raspberry pi with free or near free for most students. Also, there is open source software as well that could eat into their niche.

Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features. Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation to another machine, you have to send them a signed document and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could go on all day about the friction and restrictions.

They have an excellent and unique product and I would love to pour them money (between me and my employer we pay about EUR 1000 /year to Intellij, and this is only one provider). But for some reason I do not feel comfortable between the immense power imbalance between them and myself. It makes me uneasy to invest in the ecosystem.

I wonder how many clients they have their CAP users in the academic world.

Fully agreed on the friction. It is quite annoying if you have a license, but it's not widespread at your company. The core restrictions are rediculous as well for such an expensive product.

I use it for things I need, but similar to you, I try to stick to other tools (Python for me) just to avoid the frustrations.

They can move a license fairly easily, but there ended up being some other annoying issues for me recently that made me want to wash my hands entirely.

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