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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

"Open source" and "commercial" are not antonyms, but people working on proprietary software think they are.

Only if you use an overly literal interpretation of "commercial" yet don't use the literal interpretation of "open source" (since it's also possible to make source code visible to the public without using a license that would be considered "open source").

You have just rediscovered the reason that some people talk about "free software", and some people talk about "open source".

The sort of access to source code that is being expected here is really no more than the sort of access that you can get to Windows code. It really is not an unreasonable expectation.

No - when most people use the term "open source", they mean something along the lines of the Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/definition), rather than the literal meaning; this is independent from the distinctions between open source and free software, which are mostly about philosophy rather than the set of applicable licenses (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html)

I suppose that you, however, do not, which makes what I was trying to say irrelevant.

Some people may think that, but I doubt that that applies here. Wolfram certainly knows that "proprietary" and "free" aren't antonyms.

I do think there is a commercial side to this, too, however. This is a kind of a hook to catch future customers of the commercial package.

And a lot of people using open source products think so too :-)

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