[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 :)