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Putting the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) On Every Raspberry Pi

Posted by timothy on from the so-good-it's-named-after-two-animals dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, effective immediately, there's a pilot release of the Wolfram Language — as well as Mathematica—that will soon be bundled as part of the standard system software for every Raspberry Pi computer. Quite soon the Wolfram Language is going to start showing up in lots of places, notably on the web and in the cloud."

4 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Blatant Shill by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Quite soon the Wolfram Language is going to start showing up in lots of places, notably on the web and in the cloud

    lol no. It's far more likely that this language will be ignored by practically everyone. Remember Arc?

  2. Re:That's a bold claim. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From personal communication with him I can say Stephen Wolfram is all about making money. There is no need for a commercial language, no one cares. If a student license costs 500 dollars or more, people rather use R (a really shitty language, but on par with mathematica) or fight their way with python.

  3. tl;dr - Still Proprietary Software by Qubit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just in case you thought things might have changed:

    As with Wolfram|Alpha on the web, the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on the Raspberry Pi are going to be free for anyone to use for personal purposes. (There’s also going to be a licensing mechanism for commercial uses, other Linux ARM systems, and so on.)

    I give the RaspberryPi folks credit for making amazing and fun toy for children (that turns out to actually be a quite powerful and useful system for all ages, but shhhh, don't tell the kids! :-). I dearly wish that more of the RaspberryPI system could be Open Hardware, and love the fact that schoolchildren are getting their hands on their own computer that runs FOSS that they can program and tinker with and invent and dream.

    But I dearly hope that the Foundation folks say "Thanks but no thanks" to this offer of crippleware. The platform should remain open to all, and putting something like this in a default install will perpetuate a system of haves and have-nots. If Wolfram wants to market this independently, then that is their perogative, but educational tools given to kids should be reuse- and remix-friendly.

    --

    coding is life /* the rest is */
    1. Re:tl;dr - Still Proprietary Software by ebenupton · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I hope the Foundation folks say "Thank you, much appreciated", and let the kids decide.

      That was pretty much what I spent the day saying. Atmosphere among the educators in the room when Conrad announced it this morning was pretty electric. If people don't like the fact that it's only free as in beer, there's always Sage.