The more I hear about Stephen Wolfram's schemes to name things after Stephen Wolfram, the more admirative I grow of Nicolas Bourbaki and wished he were publishing amazing math software these days.
You've sent me down an interesting reading path, about a group of mathematicians working under the pseudonym "Nicolas Bourbaki" and lo and behold they do even have a web site these days:
The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology.
Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
Nobody has to listen to Wolfram. Close his graphomaniac blog and forget about him.
On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects.
The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broken system of academia and the income from taxes (that should've been used to further real science) to accomplish theirs.
I mean, I studied maths and physics at uni. My recollection is that science is littered with things named after specific people when in actual fact multiple people put in hours and hours of work to making these discoveries. But only one name gets slapped on it.
‘Maxwell’s’ equations are a great example. Calculus is also a prime example (d/dx f(x) vs f’(x)). I’m pretty sure Gauss was a fantastic mathematician, but too much is named after him and a lot of recognition taken away from others who greatly contributed.
It’s not a new phenomena. I don’t think it’s great for things to be named after specific people at any point history, but it’s happened before and it’ll continue to happen.
The famed "von Neumann" architecture refers to a write-up he was asked to do to update the Army on progress on the ENIAC. He didn't even intend to publish it, the ENIAC was classified, it was Goldstine that published it with their names on it. See the "controversies" section here:
The book "Pioneer Programmer" by ENIAC programmer Jean Jennings Bartik goes into detail about the egos at play in taking credit for the work done by Eckert & Mauchly.
Lol, welcome to science. If you really think the head author of a paper did the work, or that any of the authors did the majority of the work, or that the authors collectively did the majority of the work, or that who did the work is also mentioned as an author - you're in for a huge surprise.
My opinion is that you obviously don't pay for free and/or open software with money but you do pay with the fatigue of bearing the creators ideological and personal whims. Software requires maintenance and support. It is not a do it once and do it perfectly. Also let's not forget about us the users who constantly attempt to dictate the path the software is heading.
If you can take away the criticism, maintenability and support commitment, you can create Bourbaki-esque softwares. Case in point - GNU utilities like cat, ls, sed etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
https://www.bourbaki.fr/
Now how does that relate to Stephen Wolfram?