The NumWorks graphing calculator [LWN.net]

The NumWorks graphing calculator

Posted Sep 29, 2017 15:33 UTC (Fri) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896)
Parent article: The NumWorks graphing calculator

As an effort to be a commercial competitor, great, the world needs more competition.

But this doesn't seem to be related to open source software or freedom, and thus, not very relevant to lwn.net. Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (BY-NC-ND) is just another proprietary license. Yes, it lets you see the source code, but since you can't make improvements or use it, you can't do much and there is little incentive to do so.

Just another proprietary calculator. Zzzzz. We already have those. It's not even very impressive as a calculator.

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The NumWorks graphing calculator

Posted Sep 29, 2017 20:40 UTC (Fri) by zyga (subscriber, #81533) [Link] (1 responses)

Hey there. I'm just a FOSS developer and a user of the product in question. I'm not affiliated with numworks.

You *can* contribute to Numworks. They are active on github and are very receptive to patches. I hope to contribute a localization into Polish for other users, so that everyone can benefit from my (brief) work. I suspect they are still figuring out the licensing part but their behaviour is very much in the FOSS spirit.

The NumWorks graphing calculator

Posted Sep 30, 2017 15:08 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

I think Free Software people are rightly wary of non-free software. So long as this system is CC-BY-NC-ND they can decide tomorrow that actually they'd rather you upgrade to their new device and cease all support for the old one. Any attempt by developers like yourself to keep it going would then be illegal, and it's up to them what they choose to do about that but it's unlikely to be comfortable for you. You might say you're sure the current leadership would never do that to you but (a) that's worth nothing in a court of law and (b) none of us is invulnerable to the effects of being hit by a bus, tomorrow this whole project could be owned by Casio or whatever.

If as the article hints they move to CC-BY-NC that's still not free, but it's a healthier situation in which to be volunteering your efforts because (so long as it remains a hobby) it can keep going without the say-so of the original creators.