How Numworks killed third-party developement - a technical approach – M4x1m3 – A random french developer's blog.

Numworks is a French calculator manufacturer. When it was created in 2017, its main goals were intuitivity, ease of use, and openness. While Epsilon, their firmware, was never really open source, Numworks has been giving absolute freedom to the user to modify the software/firmware on the device, and now they’re taking away that user freedom, while also making the license less permissive.

We will first talk about the context in which this article is released and the closing down of the Numworks platform, then we will talk about the technical implementations of the restrictions put on the user.

At the beginning, Epsilon, the Numworks’ firmware, was licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND, which caused problems for the potential contributors of Epsilon, because it was technically illegal to fork Epsilon, make changes, and create a pull-request on Numworks’ repository. In 2018, everything changed, as they decided to change the license to CC-BY-NC-SA, thus giving the user the right to edit the firmware. This didn’t mean that the firmware was Open Source. This is a common mistake people make, Epsilon was never open source in the way the Open Source Initiative or the FSF describes it.

The real strength of the Numworks calculator was that you could install whatever you wanted on it. This led to the creation of many community-driven projects, like Omega or Delta.

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