I never know when they talk about "Wolfram" whether they mean the company or the person. And then I think what an egomaniac one must be in order to name an invention/creation after oneself.
1 Fear of losing control (over their vision and centralized design of computation and representation of
the Wolfram language).
This is just false, as they would be in control over their project even if open-sourced.
Forks would be possible but would not influence the original source (if not wanted).
2 Fear of lack of innovation.
I cannot see why this would be true.
3 Fear of ignorance towards hard/boring dev. topics.
I see how that could be a problem. One solution would be funding (s. point below)
to pay devs for the boring stuff.
4 Fear of lack of funding (because dev. costs money... surprise).
Their main point (and probably a big issue of a lot of other companies
thinking about open-sourcing their software) and a very valid one indeed.
So I guess they just have not got a business modell ready involving open-sourcing their software.
Wolfram seems not so much against open-source from a philosophical point of view but they
clearly think they would not be able to fund their dev. efforts without their software revenue.
@Wolfram: The most important assets of Wolfram are the devs. working there, not the software itself.
Given this huge knowledge base around the topics covered by the Wolfram language, the support-business-modell
could very well work! Also from a philosophical point of view: Wolfram claims to unify disparate
fields of all of science which kind of is a scientific achievement on its own. Scientific results
should be available for all people of our society.
