I learned only after writing that Mathematica has "built-in chat".

I'm unsure if these projects, that get several or tens of contributors aren't run by colleges.

Here's what motivated my post. Mathematica does not show AgNO3 but does show HNO3 (noting: as organic chem chart - which does NOT show actual attachment per say - in this case H is shown bonded to O instead of N). However pubchem (which somebody said mm used as data source) does show Ag - but not where bonded. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/#

Next consider http://www.biomolecular-modeling.com/Abalone/abalone-ii.html or https://www.cp2k.org/features.

They are "funded somehow" and perhaps contributors are not paid: YET THE GROW significantly (note they are not necessarily good alternatives to non-free software doing much the same: but may be better - it may depend on funding).

Chemistry (a huge list of free softwares) is only one example of growth of "huge" projects in 2nd level "non-science" languages (based on C/clang libs or began with free software and built on top).

But it's FAR FAR more than just chemistry. Any direction you look some (college or funded individual) has made huge progress in a free language (electrical sims, chem sims, geographic syms, building model sims, etc). But these are LIMITED: they don't interoperate and don't collaborate, and are impossible to expand or work with like Mathematica.

Meanwhile Mathematica does have "chat" and remote kernel connect. these really are "collaboration" (which professions building design software has). But it's not "PRESENTED" as it: you'd have to put 2+2 together to realize you can collaborate and use it that way :) And there are no (grants?) for people who develop these projects (we assume one person is funded, the rest are encouraged to contribute but don't share in the glory).

YET PROGRESS IS PROGRESS. politics aside. What can Mathematica do to encourage the same growth we see for "large projects" (rather than small CDF)?

Why is mathematica not attracting crowd projects?

There's an interesting article related to this in a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine. It's about the future of the scientific paper (as a medium) and then compares the approaches to this taken by the teams responsible for developing Mathematica and Jupyter notebooks. In other words, it's much more a discussion of two cultures (cathedral vs. bazaar is called out) than of two products and their respective features sets.

It's worth reading – never mind its silly title. The site requires you to turn off adblocking to read it (or just temporarily disable javascript in your browser).

It would be great to have a way for many volunteers to work on calculating record numbers of digits of the MRB constant. I have a program, originally written by the late Richard Crandall (a chief scientist), that I have optimized for recent versions of Mathematica, that I have tried, with little success to enable many users to collaborate their efforts on. I would be enthused if anyone could work on it in such a way to get it so others could join me in my efforts. Various versions of the code, some brief expositions, and reasons why (or examples of how) it is so hard to compute are found in my post, Try to Break these MRB Constant Records -- http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/366628 .

The MRB is a key fundamental constant according to Crandall -- http://marvinrayburns.com/UniversalTOC25.pdf . It is also a Google Scholar subject -- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22MRB+constant%22 .