[sjansen]

You've made the mistake of expressing an unpopular opinion, so you're getting down voted. I strongly dislike proprietary software, but you raise valid concerns that should be considered instead of being downvoted into silence. (edit: at the time I wrote this comment, the parent appeared to be headed for oblivion, happily that appears to have improved)

I don't know that open sourcing Java killed Sun. More likely it was Intel coming close enough to SPARC performance at a lower price, and Linux coming close enough to Enterprise reliability also at a lower price. But it's certainly true that open sourcing Java and Solaris didn't save Sun.

Likewise, open sourcing Mozilla didn't save Netscape. In fact, I would bet the vast majority of companies that start out proprietary before deciding to open source ultimately die because they're already unhealthy and doing it as an act of desperation.

If a company isn't designed from the start to support an open source model, it's very hard to make the transition and survive. And we have no right to demand they try. Just like everyone should respect the license F/OSS authors choose, everyone should respect Wolfram's right to stay proprietary.

Of course it's also important to remember that proprietary software vendors are more likely to yank the carpet from under their users without warning. Instead of demanding the vendor open source, users should just find and support open alternatives.

[krallja]

Providing Java for free (no matter whether open or closed-source) was a big strategic blunder for Sun: it commoditized CPU architectures by providing an abstraction layer over them. Write once, run anywhere! The problem was, Intel chips were cheaper. So people just ran their Java workloads on their existing x86 PCs instead of buying expensive Sun hardware. Sun should have never written or released Java: it consumed resources, and hastened their demise.

[chrisseaton]

> it commoditized CPU architectures by providing an abstraction layer over them

I think that was part of the point - let people run their existing applications on Sun hardware. Yes it was more expensive but it was also more capable. Emphasising running on lots of smaller 'commodity' instances wasn't yet the done thing at the time.

[zepto]

You are right that it was the point. It was simply a bad goal. Sun hoped it would allow people to migrate to their hardware, when instead it enabled them to migrate away, or to never have to choose.

[LanceH]

I think it had little to do with that. Every year Sun had bigger and bigger computers like we needed bigger monolithic servers. Run an ISP and need 100,000 user telnet accounts? Bigger computer! Then, seemingly overnight, the problem is solved by buying a hundred blades instead, and paying nothing for except hardware.

Sun was riding high on the dotcom era where every new company ran out and bought an E10000, and maybe one with less specs for a development server. I've heard stories of these being shipped before payment just so they could declare the sales early -- once the bloodbath started, it Sun was left holding the bag.

BSD and Linux on commodity hardware killed everything at Sun and Java really had nothing to do with it.

[zepto]

I think Java had quite a lot to do with making those BSD and Linux boxes run the kind of software people were using for ‘e-commerce’ back then.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> You've made the mistake of expressing an unpopular opinion, so you're getting down voted.

It's never worth saying this on HN. "downvoted" has temporal dependence, and so right now, for example, the comment you're replying to is not at net-negative. Just comment on what they said, not on how other HN readers are voting what they said.

[Zigurd]

What's wrong with that comment is that people think it is wrong for some fairly obvious reasons. for example: there is no causal link (which is also the point of the comment originating this thread). Examples of software needing to be open source to succeed, like other languages, the Android OS, etc. are easy to find.

Even your more qualified point has loads of counter-examples, that companies that did not start with their software as open source find it hard to succeed at open source: Google's search engine and much other software is not open source. Many companies mix their approach to open source with proprietary systems and products. As did Sun.

That Wolfram's justifications are weak is not necessarily a knock on their decision. But the specific point that "High-level languages need more design than low-level languages" seems particularly odd. There are high level languages where all the widely used implementations are open source and few cases of them becoming chaotic. I suppose there is survivorship bias in that observation but there are also obvious reasons why no language user community would have a lot of patience for a proliferation of variants.

[brudgers]

Netscape exited for ten billion dollars. It didn’t need saving because it was by any reasonable measure a grand slam home run. The exit was so lucrative that Andreesen is the first name in Andreesen Horowitz.

This doesn’t make a good argument that Microsoft is evil, so Silicon Valley created a mythology in which Netscape failed.

Netscape did not bet on open source. It didn’t fail. And the browser has a de facto monopoly anyway in the form of Chrome.

[otterley]

A successful public fundraising round is an indicia of success for prior investors. It is not an indicia of long-term success for a company as a going concern in terms of profits.

[brudgers]

I don’t disagree.

AOL bought Netscape (with stock) and the founders, Clark and Andreesen liquidated their Netscape stock. So did the investors. So did vested employees such as Zawinski.

Or to put it another way, if Netscape failed, then so did Viaweb. I don’t think the YC founders would describe Viaweb that way.

[otterley]

I guess it depends on what the subject is, and how one defines success. As a product, Viaweb was a failure: it gained no market traction and Yahoo! didn't even use it for very long after buying it. PG and company might not consider the business a failure since it made them rich, but that's like saying cryptocurrency is a success because it made early Bitcoin investors rich. The jury's still very much out as to whether crypto will be a success among the other well-recognized successes in the business world such as telecom, oil, steel, and automobiles.

[brudgers]

My understanding is Yahoo Stores was the Viaweb code base for a fair number of years. [1]

As a product, Firefox is still around. And Netscape disappeared in large part as an unsuccessful ground up rewrite as the brand continued following the company sale.

Bitcoin is not a company. Participants had different objectives. Those whose objective was to hold had success. Those whose objectives were political perhaps less so.

Entrepreneurs are in it to make money. Exits are how startups do it.

Telecom, oil, steel, and automobiles are state industries. Even if political correctness often demands pretending they are not…it wasn’t called the arsenal of democracy for nothing.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5739392

[chubot]

Yes agreed, as I mentioned in this other comment I think of it as Google and Microsoft successfully "commoditizing their complements", while Sun and Netscape failed to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605638

And to be clear I would like an open source Wolfram -- in fact it's almost a requirement before I spend the effort to learn it! (I have never learned a proprietary language outside of work or school)

I just think it's obvious why it's not open source -- because they have a working and sustainable business model! And on the other side, I think it's great to actually pay for what you use, rather than having something free that's filled with dark patterns or irrelevant ads, etc.

It's a hard problem, and it's obvious that we still don't know the answers :)

[snth]

Open source projects seem happy to yank the carpet from under their users, depending on what you mean. In the Python world, I'd put Python 3 and pip 21 in that category.