> against the spirit of science

Unfortunately, the bank doesn't accept spirit of science dollars, and neither does the restaurant down the street from me either.

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oefrha an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Society already funds a lot of scientific research. Some of that funding currently goes to private pockets like Wolfram Research, who license out their proprietary tech under expensive and highly limiting licenses (they're licensed per CPU core, Oracle style), so that scientists can do scientific computing.

As a former Mathematica user, a good part of the core functionality is great and ahead of open source, the rest and especially a lot of me-too functionality added over the years is mediocre at best and beaten by open source, while the ecosystem around it is basically nonexistent thanks to the closed nature, so anything not blessed by Wolfram Research is painful. In open source, say Python, people constantly try to outdo each other in performance, DX, etc.; and whatever you need there's likely one or more libraries for it, which you can inspect to decide for yourself or even extend yourself. With Wolfram, you get what you get in the form of binary blobs.

I would love to see institutions pooling resources to advance open source scientific computing, so that it finally crosses the threshold of open and better (from the current open and sometimes better).

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falcor84 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What does this have to do with anything? We as a culture decided that science is worthwhile, and that it's worth funding it with public money, which I personally strongly support. With that in mind, I want us to continue contributing to making scientific research and the benefits that it provides to be disseminated freely, while also paying good scientists with actual dollars that they could spend in restaurants.

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DiggyJohnson 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Individuals and small groups make decisions in their own interest. The same is not true of society. That’s the issue that the GP is asking you to respond to

	▲	falcor84 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I suppose I might not be understanding your and the GP's intent correctly, but I thought that the question was based on the following sentences: > I think it would be good service to use AI tools to bring open source alternatives like sympy and sage and macaulay to par. > It would be really nice to have better software written by strong software engineers who also understands the maths for mathematicians. And my response is that I think that this sort of work, which is in the public scientific interest should be funded by tax money, and the results distributed under libre licenses.

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bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>We as a culture decided that science is worthwhile, and that it's worth funding it with public money, which I personally strongly support.

what country are you in, and what percentage of the public purse goes to funding science? In the U.S about 11%, and with that number I often read articles, linked to from this site, about U.S Scientists quitting and going into private sector work or other non-scientific fields to get adequate compensation.

>while also paying good scientists with actual dollars that they could spend in restaurants.

see, my admittedly vague understanding of how things are structured tells me this part isn't what is happening.

	▲	golem14 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Um, where did you get the 11% from? Looking at https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-fe..., federal tax revenue used for "science" seems to be <=1%? Education is another 5% accroding to that site.

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jazzyjackson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So if as a culture we decide scientists are worth paying to do research, why should Wolfram not be paid to build the tool scientists use?

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omegadynamics 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the ticker is $SOS