A couple of years ago KermMartian wrote an article Casio Prizm: Why TI Calc Coders Should Abandon the Nspire CX. It detailed his frustrations towards TI and their lack of support towards the calculator community.

Several quotes from the topic:

KermMartian wrote:
However, I feel that even without this monetary aspect, TI has a social responsibility to support developers and coders. The world is rapidly moving towards a phase where technology is an integral part of every facet of everyday life from waking to sleep, and this technological progress must be supported by successive generations that are enthusiastic about engineering, programming, and invention. I have talked to countless individuals in my role as a community figure over the years who cite their TI calculator, its programming abilities, and the TI programming community for getting them into technology fields, to technology-related majors, and finally to technical careers. TI is taking the unsupportable step of trying to actively prevent any sort of development on their devices, cripping the BASIC variant on the Nspires beyond recognition, taking legal action against community members who try to expand the programmability even of the tried-and-true TI-83+/SE and TI-84+/SE series that has relatively unrestricted programming capabilities, and fighting a "jailbreaking" arms race with the community in its TI-Nspire line akin to Apple's attempts to keep developers from freely using its platform.


KermMartian wrote:
And if you welcome hackers, your platform will be made to do more awesome things more quickly, will get more free publicity as a result, and as an extra bonus, you'll curry favor with the hacker/enthusiast community. Makes sense to me!


Some might remember that I defended TI in that topic, as I believed (and still do, to a certain extend) that they were trying to open up to the community by introducing Lua and starting to communicate with several community members. However I have always supported the use and development of Ndless (and in some cases being part of it).

Fast forward to today. Cemetech has become a different place, a place where Ndless is seen as 'an unsupported hack'. Some quotes:

KermMartian wrote:
Ndless is a workaround for the protections on the TI-Nspire calculators, and therefore I'm not surprised that it's unstable. Cemetech doesn't provide support for it

KermMartian wrote:
I really, really want to not get into a cat-and-mouse game with TI about this; Cemetech for one will not be officially supporting any Ndless-like efforts for the TI-84 Plus CE.

KermMartian wrote:
Unfortunately, Ndless is an unsupported hack on the TI-Nspires, so unless someone who uses Ndless here has an idea what might be going wrong, you may be out of luck.


What happened? I suppose it's mainly due to the better relationship that Cemetech has with Texas Instruments. In that sense it's understandable. However in my opinion it's deadly for the community. Why? Because hacking/tweaking/modifying handheld calculators is just what made this community so alive. It's what drives it to innovate. Cemetech would not become what it's now without it.

And besides that, supporting Ndless or similar tools doesn't mean that you can't have a good relationship with TI. I think there are enough examples proving that is perfectly possible.

I hope that Cemetech will not continue it's 'hostility' (because that's how it feels) towards Ndless. Just as a knife can be used to do harm, in most cases it's used for productive and innovative things.
You see, the thing is that with ndless, every time TI releases a new version of an nspire OS, ndless has been blocked. I think this makes it pretty clear that they don't want random people messing around with the nspires... I completely see where you're coming from because I definitely think they should just let ndless be, but I also understand that cemetech doesn't want to fight against TI. Besides, there are other forums that are much more "ndelss friendly" and nspire oriented Smile
Good posting, Jim Smile
How times have changed, indeed.

Jim Bauwens wrote:
I suppose it's mainly due to the better relationship that Cemetech has with Texas Instruments

A relationship with TI which Cemetech largely owes to yourself, and therefore indirectly to the TI-Planet staff. We thought it was a good thing for the community, because of the gathering of technically-minded members on Cemetech.

Jim Bauwens wrote:
And besides that, supporting Ndless or similar tools doesn't mean that you can't have a good relationship with TI. I think there are enough examples proving that is perfectly possible.

Clearly Smile

I'll add that the authorship of Ndless was misattributed multiple times, despite explanations. That was disrespectful against the real authors of Ndless, which can be seen in public commit logs / README files.

Kerm editing out his post 2 days ago was a good thing, but not enough. IMO, there needs to be a commitment not to attack Ndless / its authors / Ndless-based programs anymore. For the sake of Cemetech itself (it's hard to envision Cemetech becoming a leading Nspire-related place, with such deterrents for knowledgeable Nspire members to participate), and for the community as a whole.

EDIT after mr womp womp's post:

mr womp womp wrote:
Besides, there are other forums that are much more "ndelss friendly" and nspire oriented Smile

Indeed.
Much of this discussion smells to me like statements of opinion or personal impressions as fact and I doubt my statements will come off differently, so take this with a grain of salt.

Quote:
Kerm editing out his post 2 days ago was a good thing, but not enough. IMO, there needs to be a commitment not to attack Ndless / its authors / Ndless-based programs anymore. For the sake of Cemetech itself (it's hard to envision Cemetech becoming a leading Nspire-related place, with such deterrents for knowledgeable Nspire members to participate), and for the community as a whole.
It seems to me like you're taking statements of opinion as attacks, though I won't dispute your claim that some false statements were made. I do not believe these were made in bad faith, however; I expect blame for this lies in ignorance of ndless in general since few of the regular users of Cemetech use it at all.

That brings me to my second point, which is that I don't feel the staff here are actively suppressing discussion of ndless/nspire hacking- it is just that few of the regulars are interested in playing that game with TI, while we (myself included) find there are more worthwhile things to pursue.
There's nothing wrong with either approach- I wouldn't reject nspire discussion immediately, but I probably wouldn't participate either because I don't care about the platform. The fact that there are other forums that do care is good, but that also means I don't really mind if anybody sees this site as nspire-hostile, because I'm not interested in such discussion.

TL;DR: not hostility, just indifference with a dash of ignorance.

Opinions presented here are my own and in no way represent official Cemetech policy.
Jim Bauwens wrote:
Fast forward to today. Cemetech has become a different place, a place where Ndless is seen as 'an unsupported hack'.
I think it's important to remember that Kerm is not the whole of Cemetech. Just because he says something (poorly) and it gets interpreted a certain way, doesn't mean we all agree. Me and Jonimus both told him that the "unsupported hack" part came across as aggressive and kind of weird, given that DCS is also unsupported.

KermMartian wrote:
I really, really want to not get into a cat-and-mouse game with TI about this; Cemetech for one will not be officially supporting any Ndless-like efforts for the TI-84 Plus CE.
I would certainly support it. So, again, Kerm is not all of Cemetech. Even the staff have different opinions on lots of things. That said, I can see where Kerm is coming from there. Arms races aren't fun, and we don't want to deal with platforms that are locked out like that. It's not nearly as political as you make it seem. It's just uninteresting to most of us.

Jim Bauwens wrote:
Because hacking/tweaking/modifying handheld calculators is just what made this community so alive. It's what drives it to innovate. Cemetech would not become what it's now without it.
I 100% agree. I've always been pro us doing whatever we want to have fun with our devices. I said so with the Prizm, and I'd say so with the CE--though it looks like that may not be a problem with the CE. I don't really have much of an opinion on the nspire. I'm mostly indifferent.

Jim Bauwens wrote:
I hope that Cemetech will not continue it's 'hostility' (because that's how it feels) towards Ndless. Just as a knife can be used to do harm, in most cases it's used for productive and innovative things.
Again, please don't misconstrue Kerm's ignorance as Cemetech being hostile. There are more people here than just Kerm, and Kerm mostly just speaks without thinking about how others--especially others who may be more sensitive to these things--may perceive it.

Lionel Debroux wrote:
I'll add that the authorship of Ndless was misattributed multiple times, despite explanations.
This is the type of thing Kerm is chronically bad at. You learn over the years to not take it so personally and just learn to correct him enough times that it sticks. He's misrepresented my projects on multiple occasions. I imagine if it came from a place of disrespect, I wouldn't be an admin. Kerm is just silly like that sometimes.

Lionel Debroux wrote:
it's hard to envision Cemetech becoming a leading Nspire-related place, with such deterrents for knowledgeable Nspire members to participate
It's hard to envision us wanting to become that. I wouldn't presume to speak for everyone, but I think most of us just aren't too interested in nspire stuff. There are better forums for that, and I encourage anyone interested in nspire and ndless to pursue those forums. Just like if someone started asking question about Nintendo DS development here, they wouldn't get much response, and would be better off going to a community where there are more knowledgeable people.
Tari wrote:
Much of this discussion smells to me like statements of opinion or personal impressions as fact and I doubt my statements will come off differently, so take this with a grain of salt.


Yes, it was a impression that I got. That's why I created this topic, to see how much of it reflects reality.

Tari wrote:

That brings me to my second point, which is that I don't feel the staff here are actively suppressing discussion of ndless/nspire hacking- it is just that few of the regulars are interested in playing that game with TI, while we (myself included) find there are more worthwhile things to pursue.


I agree, there wasn't any active suppressing going on, rather just some negativity towards Ndless (as show in my first post). Everyone is also entitled to their opinion and stance. It's just that I was worried what the effects could be.

merthsoft wrote:
I think it's important to remember that Kerm is not the whole of Cemetech. Just because he says something (poorly) and it gets interpreted a certain way, doesn't mean we all agree. Me and Jonimus both told him that the "unsupported hack" part came across as aggressive and kind of weird, given that DCS is also unsupported.


True, you do have a point here. I should have been more careful with addressing Cemetech as a whole.

merthsoft wrote:

So, again, Kerm is not all of Cemetech. Even the staff have different opinions on lots of things. That said, I can see where Kerm is coming from there. Arms races aren't fun, and we don't want to deal with platforms that are locked out like that. It's not nearly as political as you make it seem. It's just uninteresting to most of us.


I understand Kerm's point too and where he is coming from. But again, it was a bit towards the negative side for Ndless.

merthsoft wrote:
I 100% agree. I've always been pro us doing whatever we want to have fun with our devices. I said so with the Prizm, and I'd say so with the CE--though it looks like that may not be a problem with the CE. I don't really have much of an opinion on the nspire. I'm mostly indifferent.


I'm glad to hear so. If my first post might have offended you in some way, I apologize for that.

The main point of this topic was to see what the actual stance of Cemetech was. I'm glad to hear that many of the points I mentioned don't apply to Cemetech as a whole.
Of course, I should also stress that Kerm is able to make "executive decisions" on what we will and won't officially support. That doesn't mean that I'll follow them, though Wink
Quote:
Lionel Debroux wrote:
I'll add that the authorship of Ndless was misattributed multiple times, despite explanations.
This is the type of thing Kerm is chronically bad at. You learn over the years to not take it so personally and just learn to correct him enough times that it sticks. He's misrepresented my projects on multiple occasions. I imagine if it came from a place of disrespect, I wouldn't be an admin. Kerm is just silly like that sometimes.
I'm human, I make mistakes, and in general no more malice is intended when I make mistakes than when anyone else makes mistakes. I certainly have, as an infrequent, English-language visitor to TI-Planet, seen TI-Planet as the main website providing Ndless news and downloads, and hence assumed that Ndless was, officially or unofficially, a TI-Planet project. I know you've said it before, but would you be sufficiently kind as to add a succinct explanation of what the relationship is here so I don't unintentionally offend with incorrect information in the future?

merthsoft wrote:
Jim Bauwens wrote:
Fast forward to today. Cemetech has become a different place, a place where Ndless is seen as 'an unsupported hack'.
I think it's important to remember that Kerm is not the whole of Cemetech. Just because he says something (poorly) and it gets interpreted a certain way, doesn't mean we all agree. Me and Jonimus both told him that the "unsupported hack" part came across as aggressive and kind of weird, given that DCS is also unsupported.
It was a poorly-phrased post that intended to convey a different message, and I was more than happy to edit it to remove unnecessary text that didn't convey what I wanted to get across.

Quote:
KermMartian wrote:
I really, really want to not get into a cat-and-mouse game with TI about this; Cemetech for one will not be officially supporting any Ndless-like efforts for the TI-84 Plus CE.
I would certainly support it. So, again, Kerm is not all of Cemetech. Even the staff have different opinions on lots of things. That said, I can see where Kerm is coming from there. Arms races aren't fun, and we don't want to deal with platforms that are locked out like that. It's not nearly as political as you make it seem. It's just uninteresting to most of us.
I speak for Cemetech as a whole when I say "Cemetech will not be officially supporting any Ndless-like efforts". As many in TI and the community no doubt appreciate, as an ambassador between the community and TI Education, I have to play a delicate balancing act of what I personally, and Cemetech "officially", does and promotes. On the one hand, our relationship with TI has yielded a lot of great progress towards official support of calculators as programming tools, and I'm excited where that is going. On the other hand, I'm an engineer and hardware hacker at heart, and my annual Maker Faire booth, "Hacking Graphing Calculators," certainly shows off things like third-party software and hardware hacks.

merthsoft wrote:
Of course, I should also stress that Kerm is able to make "executive decisions" on what we will and won't officially support. That doesn't mean that I'll follow them, though Wink
^This. Wink
Quote:
I certainly have, as an infrequent, English-language visitor to TI-Planet, seen TI-Planet as the main website providing Ndless news and downloads,

Nowadays, yeah. Omnimaga was the English-speaking place where the development of Ndless itself moved to in the summer of 2010 (from yAronet, where a well-known member was too destructive), but it's gone a lot downhill.

Quote:
and hence assumed that Ndless was, officially or unofficially, a TI-Planet project. I know you've said it before, but would you be sufficiently kind as to add a succinct explanation of what the relationship is here so I don't unintentionally offend with incorrect information in the future?

The fact that the release of Ndless, along with several updated Ndless-based programs, is announced in a synchronized way on the official site and TI-Planet, is a clear hint that some TI-Planet staff members have private information about Ndless somewhat in advance from the general public, participate in beta-testing and the writing / translation of public announcements.
However, in the current repository on Github and in the earlier repositories, TI-Planet staff member contributions are a small minority. Most of my own contributions were minor, pre-date the TI-Planet era (which began in the summer of 2011), and may well not be in the current code base anymore to begin with. In the current repository, there are basically two commiters: Vogtinator and ExtendeD.

Is that the kind of information you need ?
  
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