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Or accelerated, since development would have ceased to be restricted to Wolfram's employees

If that was really going to be the case then we wouldn't be having this discussion, there would already be an open source streaking ahead.

Have you seen a little piece of software called Python that basically single-handedly ushered the age of AI? What did Wolfram do except playing toys in his high walled sandbox?

Figuratively half of the comments under this post are "I guess it's cute but I can't see anything in there that I couldn't do with Python".

Yet people are still paying for Mathematica and you are calling for it to be open sourced.

If the open source was so great what Wolfram did would be irrelevant.

People pay for so many idiotic and irrelevant things that this is barely an argument in context of any other than hustling. Especially if you consider corporations and institutions to be "people".

For all of Wolfram hubris, Mathematica is just the third kind on the block, after Matlab and Maple. With his ambitions he was obviously aiming for something more culturally relevant.

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