🚀 go-pugleaf

rocek@dirac.physics.sunsyb.edu (Martin Rocek) writes:

>Is there anyone at FSF who is interested in writing a free replacement
>for Mathematica?  Wolfram has one of the most predatory policies that
>I know of;
As far as I know, Wolfram is *very* jealous about anybody who tries to
create a Mathematica-lookalike.  Some time ago, in this newsgroup there
was a thread about somebody who created a LISP frontend to accept
Mathematica-like input (forgot the name, sorry).  It was called
L-Mathematica.

Wolfram's lawyer(s) sent the author a letter, suggesting that Wolfram
had a copyright on such things like names beginning with capital letters
etc.  (you know, like Sin, Cos, etc.) and on the square brackets used to
delimit function arguments, and on the name Mathematica itself.  This
was all very politely worded but did not leave any doubts about what
would happen if the author didn't comply.

I had saved one particularly humorous followup to the lawyer's letter,
which essentially stripped off the legalese and reduced the letter to
its essentials.  Unfortunately, I have cleaned up my News directory only
a week or so ago, so it's gone into the bitbucket.

>[Situation description deleted]
>Mathematica is a pretty useful program, but Wolfram's policies seem
>extreme.  I am interested in any comments on the above.

Leaving copyright considerations aside for the moment, writing a program
like Mathematica from scratch is going to be very difficult.  I think
it's going to be more difficult than writing an entire operating system.
I've written some numerical software and even though they were just toy
problems, I wasn't bored at all, because sooner or later the code would
find Yet Another Interesting Way to Fail (tm) :-)

I *am* interested in participating if someone wants to coordinate the
efforts.  I'm just not a big coordinator.  Also, I assume that the
project will take at least four to five years before even a prototype
can be released. This estimate is due to the following factors:

    * Participants will be widely distributed around the world.

    * Writing good math software is hard, even for a genius.

    * We'd have to do some heavy research.

    * There is no linear speedup with the amount of people involved.

    * Coordination will probably not be smooth

    * People come and go

And so on.  Before you tackle a problem as large as this, you should
think twice!  Nevertheless, I'd appreciate seeing Wolfram's monopoly
broken.  (As I said above, I am willing to contribute.)  This thread is
interesting.  I hope that lots of people will discuss this, too.

Have fun.

+------- No .sig? OH, COME ON! --------+-"The derivative snuggles  close to-+
| email:  neuhaus@informatik.uni-kl.de | the function---whatever to snuggle |
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-- 
+------- No .sig? OH, COME ON! --------+-"The derivative snuggles  close to-+
| email:  neuhaus@informatik.uni-kl.de | the function---whatever to snuggle |
| snail mail: Stephan Neuhaus/Hilgard- | means; I'm too old for that"       |
| ring 32/6750 Kaiserslautern/Germany  |                       -- Math Prof |