> Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?
It’s not open source.
Even if the engine is “free”, I don’t want to build an open source product with it and hope to be granted a “free production license.” If I build something on my own time I don’t want to ask my employer to purchase a “production license” as soon as it becomes useful.
Wolfram believes that mathematics software (or “computational knowledge” or whatever he calls his entire enterprise now) must be proprietary and paid-for in order to exist. Maybe it’s true; all of the successful and wildly popular computer algebra systems are closed source. (wxMaxima is rough to use, Axiom has 3 or 4 different forks, each with fewer than 10 developers, SymPy just isn’t there, Sage is absolutely wonderful but not polished or easy to deploy, ...) But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain. There is a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s.
I think Wolfram needs to think quite hard about how he wants to get his technology in the hands of developers while maintaining a business. Not that my opinion matters, but if he can manage to do it by open sourcing Wolfram Language, Wolfram Engine, or something like that, while keeping his business intact, I might again consider him to be the genius he was lauded to be in his 20s.
>But that’s completely at odds with how most software engineers work these days. Most software is grounded in an open source development and deployment tool chain.
Imagine saying this with a straight face. Maybe in web development, but the vast majority of programmers are using closed source tools to produce closed source software.
You're either thinking of a tiny picture vs the whole picture (web devs vs programming in general) or you honestly have zero concept of what programming looks like outside of web apps.
In applied math, data science, statistics, the OP is right: free software is the norm.
I’ll add to the list: mathematical modelling, optimization, control, essentially all machine learning, etc.
Except for perhaps optimizers (which some of the best are closed source, e.g. Mosek), the entire rest of the stack is open source.
CUDA is not open source.