Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.
At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.
Much of this blog could be summed up with two answers: (1) free, open-source software can be very good, but it isn’t good at doing what we are trying to do; with a large fraction of the reason being (2) open source distributes design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task, but large-scale, unified design needs centralized control and sustained effort.
I came up with 12 reasons why I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. I would be interested to hear your views in the comments section below the blog.