I don't care that it's not open source, it's a unique technology. Actual algorithms solving actual problems correctly. None of that fuzzy search that you'd get if you used Google. It's an amazing tool in its domain.
The reason for its dismissal goes a bit deeper than the simple fact that it’s not open source. We pay for other software (like E&M solvers), why not this? Because its use is not compartmentalized. It’s a programming language with the world’s most expansive standard library. Just as is the case with—say—Python, folks using this have no end to what they would build, including company IP. The code would absolutely not be portable, and your tech stack would be vendor-tied. That’s a danger zone for any serious enterprise.
I learned this lesson (albeit from a distance) when Microsoft killed off Visual Basic 6 and replaced it with Visual Basic .Net.
A closed source solution, where all you have is documentation (potentially flawed), including manually authored change information, just feels archaic at this point.
Companies should derive that trust factor from other factors based on their unique circumstances. If you are Amazon's competitor for instance it is probably not wise to use AWS for anything, but if you are a startup it could be very wise to take a bit of lock-in to avoid rolling your own infrastructure. If you are an established company maybe use AWS but in a way that you could move to another provider without too much pain, but balance that against some of the goodies you get by staying locked in.
I guess the same nuanced considerations have to be made to decide to use Wolfram Engine or not. There is no clear answer that suits all end users.
I've been reading as much as I can on RMS's site recently because I want to expand my mind on these sorts of topics. I really want to understand how "free" software can work at a practical level, where you say "here is a piece of software, it's $1000 from me, and you are free to give it to your friends, modify it, and resell it, even to people who would have paid me $1000, but now they wont need to" and how that ties in with making a sustainable business. I think it takes some luck and good imagination to make such a business work by selling some by-product such as consulting services or whatever. But for a lot of companies non-free is required in my opinion to exist as a business. Happy to have my mind changed.
With AWS, you can pack up and go to a different cloud provider, and get the same Linux and the same gcc and the same TCP/IP stack. There's probably some other code you'd have to change, but the essential core is non-proprietary and nobody can take it away from you. Abstracting further, if Linux decided to go in a weird direction, you can get a POSIX-conformant Unix-like OS from other groups, like FreeBSD or Illumos. The Linux codebase can be forked as well, providing an even stronger insurance relative to what happens when some company's or business unit's incentives no longer align with yours.
And that part about aligning incentives is powerful. In the closed-source world, it's also fragile: One company being bought out can shift things tectonically for all of the software that company made. It becomes a treadmill, or a movie routine of constantly jumping from platform to platform as each of them dies off or is pulled out from under you as "corporate synergy" realigns strategic chakras feng shuis your old codebase into worthlessness.
If you are "seriously" using AWS: A lot. Value of AWS is not that it offers compute nodes. But a full catalogue of further services and tooling APIs and migrating of that can be a big project.
maxima has existed for ages, maple has very similar fatures
The parent said it doesn't compete "in the breadth or depth of Mathematica" and you responded with "it does compete because it's free!"
Your response does not refute the parent's argument.
Maxima is just a computer algebra system- one small part of what Wolfram does.
1. It is arguably the most sophisticated CAS available. Open source tooling has crept up in performance and completeness in recent years, but Mathematica still dwarfs every open source system in performance and feature availability. Competing proprietary systems like Maple are capable of beating Mathematica in certain specific domains (like PDEs), but that leads me to my second point.
2. Mathematica isn't just a CAS. It also supports sophisticated data analysis and ingestion, visualization, (some) machine learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, signal processing, climatology, meteorology, geography, financial analysis, and limited forms of convex optimization.