Colour Maximite 2

You just said exactly what I was thinking but didn’t quite have the guts to say.

It’s not a requirement for success, but it’s enough to turn some people away because of the problems it causes.

When releasing commercial software that has had hours of development time behind it and the software itself is the product, it makes sense to keep the source closed off (most of the time).

But when you’re making something where the aim is to encourage people to write their own code and hack things, closed source doesn’t make sense because it’s the very antithesis of being able to hack things.
It’s essentially saying “you’re not allowed to hack this”.

Open source is what gives people the freedom to hack away as they please, use pieces of other people’s code and publish their own code knowing that code will be free for others to learn from and build upon.

As @jonne says, if there’s enough interest then eventually someone will probably try to make open source alternative firmware, and if it gets off the ground people will probably end up submitting their bug fixes to that version instead of the official version.
That’s more or less how Linux started to displace Unix, and how projects like OpenMW started.

QB64 (also on GitHub) has been doing that for years.
Not on an ARM chip admittedly, but on x86 CPUs.

Just to understand why they chose that license for the firmware: http://geoffg.net/OpenSource.html

Another possible reason: hacking the BASIC interpreter, although interesting from the hack-everything-at-hand perspective, could lead to alternative firmwares with different behaviour or incompatibilities that the creator may not want to happen.

Learned lessons: next time I buy a new TV or a new car, I will look for an open source one.

Hey hey hey.

Lets keep it civil.

None of us have answered @HomineLudens actual question

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I had a full breakdown written, but in the interest of keeping this brief:

As Geoff himself says:

having said that, it still gives no protection from someone who will take what they want regardless of licensing provisions. Only a million dollars and a team of lawyers would prevent that.

If someone wants to reverse engineer closed source software,
the only things stopping them are effort and expertise.

That can happen anyway.

Making the official version closed source doesn’t stop people from replacing the firmware,
it just means they have to do everything from scratch and understand the hardware.

Like I said, that’s more or less how Linux started.
Linus Torvalds was annoyed at MINIX being only available for educational use,
so he decided to write an OS from from scratch.
And now it’s it’s one of the three most popular operating systems (albeit in the form of various different ‘distros’).

All it takes is one dedicated person.

Open source TV sort of exists already in the form of MythTV and Kodi.
Originally I was going to say “it’ll be decades before open source cars are a thing”,
but apparently Tesla’s cars actually run on Linux and they’ve released the source code,
which is the most astonishing thing I’ve heard in quite a while.

And of course, many different open source phones already exist though,
using both ‘open source’ hardware and open source software,
and obviously open source games consoles like the Pokitto are still going strong.


I expect the answer is ‘nobody knows’.
Maybe one of us should send Geoff an email?

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So I take a minute and read some docs of the manual.
It’s a nice old way of programming. So no break points or anything fancy. Just TRACE command to output some info.

Overal the project is interesting and offers a different approach/point of view for a programmable game device.

It is more than a game device, it can read out sensors and stuff.

This doesn’t have the same feeling. You can just turn on the maximite and start programming. Also the maximite is not a new/ recent project