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Responders have been making the argument that Jupyter is beating Mathematica because of financial or social issues. I'd like to posit a different interpretation, which could be construed to encapsulate these reasons, as well as additional other factors.

Jupyter has a lower friction to adoption and usage than Mathematica, for a definition of friction which encompasses ease of acquisition and sharing. I include economic considerations in the ease of acquisition and sharing. Lack of proprietary walled garden lock-in/lock-out factors in as well.

People are also likely considering the longer term scenario, whereby data, model, and information interchange has been hindered by proprietary formats (the "wall" in the walled garden) and lack of complete information on how to get information in and out. Which is what the OP was complaining about, as they were not able to easily construct a publication quality preprint/submission from one, but could do it easily from the other.

Some of these sources of friction are effectively "own-goals", that is, you increase friction in such a way as to prevent something that people need to do, to be effectively impossible. Or you hide it. Or disable certain groups from using that functionality.

Then the question is balancing the longevity of the format, the proprietary value against alternatives. Increasingly, people are less interested in this friction for a number of critical systems.

I am looking at this from the perspective of someone who has a few 10's of MB of data/writings on 25-30 year old 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch floppies. These are in formats for which I may not have an ability to extract the data/information without some significant effort.

The formats that have survived well for me over the last 30 years have been either open, or readable/writeable with open tools. The closed ones, not so much luck with.



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