https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-doze... 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. [...] 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. - A coherent vision requires centralized design - High-level languages need more design than low-level languages - You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields - Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too - Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you - Our developers work for you, not just themselves - Unified computation requires unified design - Unified representation requires unified design - Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market - Paid software offers an open quid pro quo - It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D - Bad design is expensive [...] FOSS development tends to react to immediate user needs—specific functionality, existing workflows or emulation of existing closed-source software. Major innovations require anticipating needs that users do not know they have and addressing them with solutions that are not constrained by an individual’s experience. [...] Open source often does create ecosystems that encourage many small-scale innovations, but while bolder innovations do widely exist at the early experimental stages, they often fail to be refined to the point of usefulness in large-scale adoption.