lol it's not unique
maxima has existed for ages, maple has very similar fatures
maxima has existed for ages, maple has very similar fatures
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.
Maxima is just a computer algebra system- one small part of what Wolfram does.
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.