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Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

> Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes everything better.

I think it does.

The market is then on ideas. Long term, someone will build an open core business model around Mathics (or similar) and that’ll create an incentive for Wolfram to reprioritize and pursue the best ideas.

The same will happen for this new biz with the open core business model. It will continue to fray as industry figures out what the market wants, pruning poor ideas/execution and rewarding good ideas/execution.

Let’s go!

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Respectfully, I disagree with that premise. That clearly hasn’t happened with OpenSage, Maxima, or half a dozen other old open source computer algebra systems, many of which were around as long as Mathematica.

If the open sourcing a system works as you describe - why haven’t those system received even a tenth of a polish that Mathematica has, over all these years?

I have my answer: because, even with all its warts, producing something of Mathematica quality requires tremendous coordinated efforts of hundreds of highly qualified professionals who need to be tightly coordinated.

If you try the “next best thing” - a few core enthusiasts plus a large number of users who do occasional contribution you can get to (an impressive) quality level of the above mentioned alternatives, but not higher.

It's true that Mathematica has more polish than Sage, but conversely Sage has vastly more pure math functionality than Mathematica (Mathematica seems to me to have focused on data analytics and neglected mathematics), so the projects just have different focus.

You’re missing the ingredient of time.

Software (as an industry) was born with the right structure. That’s why it moves so quickly.

Other industries (incl. research) need to fix internal problems before they can accelerate, i.e. tightening feedback loops such as procurement cycles. Over time, institutions who can do more with less will outmaneuver even Wolfram.

The future of the world isn’t limited by one guy leading one company.

> Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes everything better.

> I think it does.

I think that it does not automatically make it better, although open source does improve the potential for making it better, compared with not making open source.

There are also other advantages of FOSS, too. Even if you do not modify it, there are benefits to examine the code to find undesirable behaviours, reading the code to figure out something that cannot be figured out from the documentation, avoiding worrying about copyright issues as much as proprietary code, etc. And then, further benefits may be possible if the code might be modified, too.

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