HiggsBozo1337

Yeah, I agree that it should be advertised differently, stressing the obvious WIP aspect. I guess the idea is just to show that the seed for a proper C/C++ API is there, and ready to be developed further for whenever a customer requires it. Out of curiosity, what is your use case?

This intent: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1coe3cp/comment/l3e9x...

He's a one-man army of a one-year old software, so it makes sense that he would focus on core features that are most relevant to his existing customers and capable of attracting new ones. If this was important to you or someone else who would sign up for a Symbolica license, I'm sure he would improve on this. A streamlined C++ API is comparatively easier to achieve than beating state-of-the-art efficiency on key CAS algorithms...

We should encourage this original approach of licensed source available software, otherwise you end up with either black-boxy Mathematica-like software of xzlib disasters and nothing in between.

Despite Symbolica being licensed, its source code is still available which clearly shows the author's intent. It may be important in various contexts, e.g. security or satisfying certain grant requirements in academia, or whenever custom minor modifications are necessary.

I am leading an academic research group with a site-wide Symbolica license.

Because Symbolica is in early development and the work of a single person for now, one great benefit for us is the dedicated attention we receive. Any bug or feature we're particularly interested in gets immediate attention.

And despite the product being licensed, Symbolica's source-available nature gives us full confidence in the author's long-term intent. We therefore trust that accepting Symbolica as a dependency of the framework we are building will never constitute a point of failure.

Supporting Symbolica's nascent effort and having a direct line of contact with its single author also means it is easy to discuss particular arrangements specific to our use case, such as end-user license requirements.