alt Hacker NewsI agree. There are decades of work in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, with a lot of carefully made design decisions, working closely with scientists in so many fields, trying to capture what is important for their work and what knowledge is worth baking into the language. I think it’s only fair to respect Wolframs decision to keep it closed source, because otherwise he and his team wouldn’t be able to continue improving the language/system.
I believe we need to be more respectful to human creators, especially now that it has become so easy to just “reimplement” someones work, to circumvent payment or license conditions or for whatever motivation. What would you do if this work didn’t exist? Well, I guess you’d have to do it yourself or use an alternative…
That being said, the Wolfram Engine is actually free for development and personal use[1]. I had a really nice experience with Wolframite[2] on Clojure as an interface layer and that works well enough for the few non-commercial things I do with it (evaluating WL expressions directly in the editor is such a nice experience!).