[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.