Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
&gt; Why Aren’t You Using Our Technology?<p>It’s not open source.<p>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.<p>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 <i>is</i> a market for proprietary developer tools, but it had been dwindling since its prime-time in the 90s.<p>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.