NumWorks open source calculator

[Claudio L.]

Interesting device.
The OS is open source, you can modify for your own non-commercial purposes, but you may not share any derivatives or adapted material (why??). This effectively turns the open source nature of the software into a locked-down system where you can only feed modifications back to them, and they will decide whether to incorporate them or not, but you can't fork it or "be creative" outside of what the original creator wants, and certainly not publish your changes. I understand this might be needed for their exam certification. Still doesn't stop a student from hacking into the firmware to add a few cheats. It would be legal as long as he/she doesn't share them (!?).
Of course you can replace the firmware completely and publish it, but that begs the question:
If a complete firmware replacement is required, why buy their hardware vs. the HP Prime? Price is roughly the same, but with the Prime we get more flash, more ram, touchscreen, most likely a better quality keyboard, and a CPU with an actual MMU and graphics accelerator, though an older generation.

Overall a nice community effort, if it had a little more computing power it could compete very well, unfortunately I think they are priced too close to the high end TI and HP calculators, which have a very complete and mature math environment. If the price is cut by half I'd be buying one and porting newRPL to it. At this price I'd rather port it to the Prime hardware first.