All of your examples are subsidized by a parent corporate sponsor that makes billions from something else. Chrome can be "free as in beer" and Chromium source can be "free as in libre" because Google/Alphabet make billions in ads from a search engine. It's easy for MS to release VSCode and .NET for free if billions are earned from MS Office, Windows, SQL Server, etc.
Wolfram doesn't have another product that rakes in billions such that any licensing income loss from hypothetically open sourcing Mathematica would be an insignificant rounding error.
Right - and _that_ is what this post should say, not that it's not possible to have a centralized model of development.
Usually the reason that big companies open source big longstanding projects is to commoditize a complement of their main business:
- Search makes billions of dollars, and you need a web browser to search, so Google should make a fast and secure web browser (not to mention you can fill it with all sorts of dark patterns!)
- Users purchase Windows to run applications like spreadsheets. We should offer a free high quality IDE so that more applications can be made, increasing the value of the ecosystem.
- Java: Sun sells hardware, and software is the complement to hardware, so we should make a new programming language (???). To be honest, this one always seemed suspect, and maybe that explains why Sun went out of business :-/
https://www.gwern.net/Complement
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Elasticsearch is still open source they just wanted to buck companies like Amazon from taking advantage of them, which is fine by me
I'm all for open source products (I both work on and make large use of such products), but this "just open source it, you can make a business out of it anyways!" without further constraints is IMHO misguided. Open-source business models are challenging, and that needs to be recognized.
Wolfram doesn't have that, and most businesses don't. It's very easy for us say "just make it open source" if we don't have to come up with a way of paying people! Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay for Wolfram !
Oh just be a world beating, industry leading, technical titan of a company with multiple revenue streams and you can afford to give away some code to make us all happy.
Wolfram just has to launch an operating system, a search engine, a line of mobile phones and laptops, a cloud services unit, and sure then they'll give away Mathematica, what the hell why not?
I believe there is a place for proprietary software. My personal solution is to do both, sell proprietary software and publish some of the libraries involved in it as open source.
Depends on the scale you're looking for. We (ardour.org) make money with open source software by encouraging people to pay for our software, though it is GPL'ed. Do we make millions of dollars? no. Does it make money? yes.
The irony is that Blender USED to be a proprietary project, the community had to buy back the source code.