After reading the interview with Gaston Gonnet who was one of the original founders of Maple I became  interested when he started to talk about their thoughts of moving to open source.  Don't get me wrong his whole interview was quite interesting.  Then I just happened to stumble across this article http://www.c4ontario.ca/news-room/press-releases/software-wrap-up/view from April 2009, where Tom Lee from maplesoft is on a panel discussing open source software. 

I'm sure Maplesoft will never go completely open source as that would mean revealing all of it's source code.  It's code is already semi-transparent and partially open source but I'm under the impression that open source can not survive as a profitable company.  If Maplesoft were to move to open source they may benefit from rapid improvements but on the other hand it would not allow the company to really jump out into a big lead on it's competitors. 

Now that it's under control of a new Japanese management team, I think open source is even further from reality.  Not that I agree or disagree whether they ever move to open source or not, doesn't particularly bother me in the least bit.  I just found the thought of Maplesoft moving completely to open source, if not dangerous, a little interesting.  But the thought that they even considered being open source as a publicly traded company, kind of baffled my mind. 


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