The Wolfram Engine, which powers the Language as well as Wolfram's desktop and cloud products, is being released as free for developers (with limitations) so that it can be tried out and bundled into their software engineering projects. 

The range of the software projects into which the Engine can be bundled and the environments it runs is outstanding. It can run on Linux, Mac, Windows, desktop, server.It can be called from scripts or programming languages such as Python or Java, and can inter-operate with sockets, ZeroMQ and MQTT amongst others.

Hooking into the engine gives you access to the full Wolfram language, which in turn hands over access to its computational intelligence, used in all sort of domains such as Machine Learning, Graphs and Networks, Data Manipulation and Analysis or Visualization and Graphics.

The engine's launch goes hand in hand with the recent announcement of the Wolfram Client Library for Python, so that you can use the Wolfram Language from Python.

But in order to do that you have to first initialize an instance of the Engine:

>from wolframclient.evaluation import WolframLanguageSession
>session=WolframLanguageSession()

then import the `wl` factory which bundles all the Language's functions:
>from wolframclient.language import wl

to finally be able to call the Languge from Python.

For example to:

Evaluate StringReverse[“abc”] from Python using evaluate()
>session.evaluate(wl.StringReverse('abc'))
'cba'

Evaluate MinMax[{1, 5, -3, 9}], using the Wolfram Language function MinMax on a Python list:
>session.evaluate(wl.MinMax([1, 5, -3, 9]))
[-3, 9]

Query WolframAlpha for the distance between the Earth and the Sun using WolframAlpha.:
>distance = session.evaluate(wl.WolframAlpha("Earth distance from Sun", "Result"))
Quantity[1.008045994315923, AstronomicalUnit]

Convert the unit to kilometers:
>d_km = session.evaluate(wl.UnitConvert(distance, "Kilometers"))
Quantity[150801534.3173264, Kilometers]

Now let's define what "free" means in this context. The Engine is free for devs and software houses as long as it is used in the pre-production stage. When the project moves to production then a Production License needs to be acquired in order to distribute the Engine with it. But fortunately if you’re making a free, open-source system, you can apply for a Free Production License.

More Information

Wolfram Engine

Wolfram Client library for Python Github repo

Launching Today: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

Announcing the Wolfram Client Library for Python 

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