[nikofeyn]

you are describing a very limited view of what it means to do mathematics. and no, all of mathematics is not open source. much of it is locked behind institutional barriers.

also, i don't understand this fervent attitude that something must be free and open source to be useful. a lot of open source software is complete trash. there is a reason why people pay to use tools like matlab, labview, and mathematica. it is because their value exceeds their cost.

[dekhn]

i believe the phrase is "software is only free if your time is worthless". There are plenty of counterexamples to this (where there is free software that greatly increases the productivity of the user, without a great deal of time spent moving up the learning curve).

In the case of Mathematica there is a ton that is "locked away behind institution barriers". Mathematica contains millions of lines of code dedicated to implementing clever algorithms for making their root finder and other things work really, really well. but those are all internal source code lines within the company.

I've seen this play out across multiple industries. A good example is SAS and R. There are certain parts of FDA new drug applications that require, specifically, the SAS implementation of a statistical routine, and you can't use R because it doesn't implement the routine in a bit-identical manner. However, a spokesperson from SAS once said, "You'd never fly in an airplane designed by open source software" to which Boeing responded "we use open source software to design our airplanes"

[i336_]

I'm replying a little late and I'm not sure if you'll see it, but do you have a source for that quote? That's amazing.

[dave2000]

A lot of (free | non-free) software is complete trash.

The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it. You don't have to hope a company does go bust, and pay them for the product and/or support, and keep upgrading your devices to newer, still supported versions. Ok, some of that applies to free software but if you want to you could stick with the old versions, or make changes yourself, or pay someone to. These avenues just aren't open with closed source software.

Some people won't be able to afford the commercial products, and the free ones might not be as good/polished but if they get (most of) the job done then they fill a niche.

[coldtea]

>The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it.

That's a theoretical advantage. In practice lots of things needs to be true for this to happen, even if there's a large user based depending on an abandoned open source program: the code needs to be easily approachable, there should be people willing to extend it who also have the required programming skills etc.

Tons of projects that had lots of users have died or languished.

Heck, even something as popular as GTK+ -- the project is still available, but development has stalled to a halt, and there was a cry of despair from the maintainer that it was just one (one) person doing 90% of the work. If that can happen to GTK+ which is used by millions and powers Gnome, GIMP etc, consider all the other stuff.

Besides, this same theoretical advantage ("never tries") in theory is also potentially true for a proprietary product. Even if the parent company folds, the code and product could always be bought and revived in the future.