Steven, On Thursday 17 November 2005 12:04, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
On Thursday 17 November 2005 02:35 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Steven,
On Thursday 17 November 2005 10:53, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
...
Personally, I don't mind paying Wolfram Research to produce a powerful product, and feed a handful of talented Mathematicians. The value WRI returns to the world is far in excess of the money paid for their products.
He is very aggressive about protecting his so-called intellectual property, to the point of inhibiting progress in areas he believes he has claim to. This holds back progress rather than encourages or contributes to it.
Wolfram (the man) is an egotistical
I have that impression. I don't believe his contributions to science are quite as unique as he would like to believe. He should certainly tip his hat to Douglas R. Hofstadter. Nonetheless, Mathematica is an amazing product. I really don't know if any of the other computer algebra systems are anything like it. He has full room to be proud of his accomplishments.
Wolfram has as much right to be personally proud of Mathematica as Bill Gates has to be personally proud of Windows. In both cases, they're managers or executives, not technical contributors (at least not for a long time, now), so in my book, pride of accomplishment is not warranted.
tyrant who mistreats, abuses and exploits the programmers and mathematicians he hires.
I'm composing an email right now to one of his programmer/mathematicians. I'm not about to ask for a comment on that subject, but I believe the man is fairly happy to be working for Wolfram (both the company, and the man).
Switch to an alternative. Putting money in his pocket is far worse than feeding Billy boy or any of his hired guns.
Can you provide substance to this accusation? All human beings have faults. One, or even a few episodes of bad behavior do not a tyrant make. I may be knocking on his door soon.
I have not had personal dealings with him, but I've talked personally to people who have, and they are exceedingly unflattering and resentful. The impression is widespread, and so most likely is generally valid.
WRI have been very generous to me in the past, and I have no reason to complain about their business practices.
This makes me curious about who you are or represent, what has been the nature of Wolfram Research's largesse towards you and / or your organization and why it was granted.
...
By the way, the same goes for Novell, of course. So far, I'm happy to support them, but it's by no means any kind of unconditional love thing.
I assume you have concluded that I share your postion on this. I have no reason to complain about my dealings with Novell over the years. That is, until they took a swipe at the KDE. I'm dead serious when I say that much of my reason for supporting the KDE for the past 7 years (IIRC) is a direct result of my experience with Novell products in the Windows NT environment. When I saw that Novell execs were double talking about remaining behind KDE development, well...
I don't know why you'd assume that. I cannot and do not pretend to know how you feel about Novell, nor is it more than an aside here. It's just a parallel to show that similar considerations are in play. That, and perhaps to allude to the fact that if they depart from the practices that made SuSE Linux so great, I will seek those qualities elsewhere.
Steven
Randall Schulz