DM42 is now open-source!

[fermienrico]

This just came out:

https://www.swissmicros.com/License_Statement.php

Quote:Dear SwissMicros customers,

Thank you for your support in making DM42 come to fruition. We began development of the DM42 in 2015 followed by beta testing May 2017. We have been very fortunate to have a supportive community providing us with constructive feedback, bug reports and usability concerns throughout the development phase. We poured our heart and soul in pursuing for the best handheld RPN calculator in the world. Our goal is simple - we want to build useful tools for you with uncompromising quality, reliability, durability and robustness you expect from professional products.

Our relationship with the community is important to us; we listen to all forms of feedback and we take what our community thinks very seriously. In the past few days, there has been an escalation in a few online forums regarding the SwissMicros firmware in the DM42 calculator and GPL License requirements for code release to customers. In no way did we ever intend to violate the GPL, nor do we wish to neglect the work done by others. We sincerely recognize the work of Thomas Okken and the calculator community - Free42 is the operational jewel, the central core of DM42. We decided to use Free42 as it has been thoroughly tested over many years.

We have heard you and we are making things right.

DM42's source code comprises of several components - Free42 core, a custom DM42 shell developed by SwissMicros, FreeRTOS as a real-time operating system and several components from ST Microelectronics. Each part has a different licensing model. We are currently working hard to understand and correctly determine the proper hierarchy of licenses.

In the next few days, we will be releasing the full source code to be able to build your own DM42 firmware. All components of DM42 will be open-sourced. We think that this is the right thing to do and hopefully with the help from community, we can accelerate the development of DM42's software on Github.

Full source code will be available at: http://github.com/swissmicros/DM42.

We ask for your patience as we prepare the source code for a public release.

Thank you,
Michael Steinmann
SwissMicros

Wooo hooo! Good news Congrats and thank you Thomas and Michael.

[Michael de Estrada]

(04-06-2018 10:14 PM)fermienrico Wrote:  This just came out:

https://www.swissmicros.com/License_Statement.php

Quote:Dear SwissMicros customers,

Thank you for your support in making DM42 come to fruition. We began development of the DM42 in 2015 followed by beta testing May 2017. We have been very fortunate to have a supportive community providing us with constructive feedback, bug reports and usability concerns throughout the development phase. We poured our heart and soul in pursuing for the best handheld RPN calculator in the world. Our goal is simple - we want to build useful tools for you with uncompromising quality, reliability, durability and robustness you expect from professional products.

Our relationship with the community is important to us; we listen to all forms of feedback and we take what our community thinks very seriously. In the past few days, there has been an escalation in a few online forums regarding the SwissMicros firmware in the DM42 calculator and GPL License requirements for code release to customers. In no way did we ever intend to violate the GPL, nor do we wish to neglect the work done by others. We sincerely recognize the work of Thomas Okken and the calculator community - Free42 is the operational jewel, the central core of DM42. We decided to use Free42 as it has been thoroughly tested over many years.

We have heard you and we are making things right.

DM42's source code comprises of several components - Free42 core, a custom DM42 shell developed by SwissMicros, FreeRTOS as a real-time operating system and several components from ST Microelectronics. Each part has a different licensing model. We are currently working hard to understand and correctly determine the proper hierarchy of licenses.

In the next few days, we will be releasing the full source code to be able to build your own DM42 firmware. All components of DM42 will be open-sourced. We think that this is the right thing to do and hopefully with the help from community, we can accelerate the development of DM42's software on Github.

Full source code will be available at: http://github.com/swissmicros/DM42.

We ask for your patience as we prepare the source code for a public release.

Thank you,
Michael Steinmann
SwissMicros

Wooo hooo! Good news Congrats and thank you Thomas and Michael.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the new $19.99 Victor V42 ! lol

[zeno333]

(04-06-2018 10:23 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 10:14 PM)fermienrico Wrote:  This just came out:

https://www.swissmicros.com/License_Statement.php


Wooo hooo! Good news Congrats and thank you Thomas and Michael.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the new $19.99 Victor V42 ! lol

If any physical clone of the 42 came out, which very much doubt would ever occur, it would be garbage compared to the SW DM42...

[Manolo Sobrino]

(04-06-2018 10:23 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  I can’t wait to get my hands on the new $19.99 Victor V42 ! lol

Exactly.

[Michael de Estrada]

(04-07-2018 12:38 AM)zeno333 Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 10:23 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  I can’t wait to get my hands on the new $19.99 Victor V42 ! lol

If any physical clone of the 42 came out, which very much doubt would ever occur, it would be garbage compared to the SW DM42...

My comment was meant tongue in cheek in response to all the hoopla about cheap Chinese clones resulting from the open source release of the DM42 code.

[toml_12953]

(04-06-2018 10:23 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 10:14 PM)fermienrico Wrote:  This just came out:

https://www.swissmicros.com/License_Statement.php


Wooo hooo! Good news Congrats and thank you Thomas and Michael.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the new $19.99 Victor V42 ! lol

I see a SwitzMicrowz SM42 in our future! From the same fine folks that brought you the Gaxio calculators shown on YouTube!

[fermienrico]

I'd personally go with the MissSwicros MD42. Little bit more on the pricey side with $29.99 pricetag, but you gotta splurge once in a while in life you know.

[pier4r]

(04-06-2018 10:23 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  I can’t wait to get my hands on the new $19.99 Victor V42 ! lol

Does it features the inverted square root of 2 being 31? If yes I'll buy it.

Also, every 3 digits there is a random char appearing.
https://youtu.be/ovsYv-b-wWI

[bernouilli92]

If you're referring to the video testing the gaxio fg-82ms, the tester actually typed sqrt(2) followed by Ans*22, that's why he got 31,11 as an answer.
Because the display was missing pixels, he typed Ans*22 instead of Ans*sqrt(2)

[grsbanks]

Also, I'm not sure the tester was aware that Casio have been selling OEM PCBs to alternative manufacturers for as long as I can remember.

Back in the day, Boots (a chain of pharmacies here in the UK) diversified and sold green VFD machines (yes, that far back!) under the Boots brand that were just Casios with a Boots label slapped on them. The stationers WHSmith did likewise with later LCD machines, both 4-bangers and scientific.

It's nothing new and it's still going on today. Even HP is selling rebranded Casios.

[Dave Britten]

Hey, if there's a sudden gold rush to flood the market with programmable RPN calculators, then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, I say.

[pier4r]

(04-08-2018 08:54 AM)grsbanks Wrote:  Also, I'm not sure the tester was aware that Casio have been selling OEM PCBs to alternative manufacturers for as long as I can remember.

I don't think he is aware. I was not aware myself. I was thinking that Chinese companies copied the Casio 1:1

[grsbanks]

(04-08-2018 01:37 PM)pier4r Wrote:  

(04-08-2018 08:54 AM)grsbanks Wrote:  Also, I'm not sure the tester was aware that Casio have been selling OEM PCBs to alternative manufacturers for as long as I can remember.

I don't think he is aware. I was not aware myself. I was thinking that Chinese companies copied the Casio 1:1

Well, this might be an eye-opener for you in that case:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F873-zbyM8

[pier4r]

Ha you have a YouTube channel! Subscribed (we should collect the channel of the community).

What about the triplets problem? Link to the thread/ articles please!

[andylithia]

I don't think getting copied will be the case. As an average Chinese student, I should note that today nearly every middle school student, high school student, and university student have a genuine Casio or a licensed OEM Casio or a fake Casio here. The market for Casio scientific is ever so vibrant in the Chinese education market, that's why the copyright-ignorant people here copied it by spending hundreds of hours reading the mask ROM dieshot, do all sorts of decapping and hacking to obtain the code (Fun fact: you can see people hanging ADs of decapping and chip level reverse engineering on their balcony in the inner streets of Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen) or just by stealing the code from the production line at a risk of getting sued. That's pathetic, disliked by the educated people here, changing slowly, but unfortunately will still be there for the years to come.

However, DM42 isn't, and will never be the case. The scale of vintage HP community is extremely small here in China (China was never the market for high-end HP handhelds). And anyone who's in the Chinese HP community has well above average education level. We will just spit on the shameless clones and buy the genuine one.

[Michael de Estrada]

(04-08-2018 02:51 PM)andylithia Wrote:  However, DM42 isn't, and will never be the case. The scale of vintage HP community is extremely small here in China (China was never the market for high-end HP handhelds). And anyone who's in the Chinese HP community has well above average education level. We will just spit on the shameless clones and buy the genuine one.

The main market for cheap Chinese knockoffs is not China, but the rest of the world, including the USA where I live. I don’t think they have a negative effect on the high end quality and vintage market, and serve a useful purpose to augment the market IMO. For example, I bought a dozen new Victor V12 clones of the HP 12c, so that I could save wear and tear on my classic HP 12c. I’ve got one in my kitchen, one on my workbench in my garage, one in the glovebox in my car, etc. They also make good stocking stuffers at Christmas time. The interesting thing about the Victor V12 is that it is not advertised as an RPN calculator, and can also be setup to operate in algebraic mode, although it lacks parentheses, so it is not very useful as a non-RPN calculator.

[andylithia]

(04-08-2018 05:22 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  The main market for cheap Chinese knockoffs is not China, but the rest of the world, including the USA where I live. I don’t think they have a negative effect on the high end quality and vintage market, and serve a useful purpose to augment the market IMO.

Interesting... I actually have never seen one in my real life (everyone is selling HP12c). All of my assumptions are based on my personal observation here in China. I'm not sure about the worldwide market scale for calculators like the DM42. I doubt it won't be very large, won't be large enough for anyone to think that making a DN42 is a profitable idea. It seems to me that DM42 is only popular in the vintage calculator community, which is a niche market. Tell me if I'm wrong.
(Forgot to mention the main point in the last post. )

[Waon Shinyoe]

(04-08-2018 05:22 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  For example, I bought a dozen new Victor V12 clones of the HP 12c, so that I could save wear and tear on my classic HP 12c.

However, Victor is an old American company...[source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Technology] yet they are now selling cheap Chinese OEM products. What a pity ; )

V12 is really not a good example - how many of them have you ever seen? I've never seen a single one in my whole life personally (I'm also Chinese. Live in America currently.)

There are a lot of clones of CASIO fx-82MS in both countries. They are being sold in bookstores, supermarkets, etc. That will be a good example of what people is willing to copy - those with a large market. Hundreds of thousands. As for RPN calculators... really, it's merely a history. Even ten years ago they were already dead in consumers' market. It's market share is close to none.

And it really makes little sense to talk about how opening the source of DM42 can increase the risk of being cloned - DM42 is based on STM32. Easy enough for most reverse engineering companies to crack without its source code. And it's also relatively easy to build one without reference of DM42's code - actually I believe the difficulty is about the plastic part. You need to build the plastic dies & molds. This is the expensive part, even in China.

BTW, HP's current scientific SmartCalc series are all merely clones of CASIO's...

My opinion on this event:
People are simply trying to portrait SwissMicro as a victim. However, SwissMicro is not a victim of anything.
The open-source community is the victim.
SwissMicro still does not release the source code currently. So DM42 is NOT open-source for now.

I believe SwissMicro is also benefited from cheap Chinese manufacturing. The price difference for plastic parts is really HUGE between China and developed countries.

I helped Chris Chung on his NP-41 project for finding cheap customized LCD. What Chris initially found in western cost thousands of dollars for setup and required MOQ of thousands. On Taobao, we successfully found a Chinese factory offering $600 for setup with 20 samples.

[Jake Schwartz]

Perhaps now's the time for some enterprising individual to consider doing a DM-42 app for Android and iOS? The larger screen improves the 42 quite a bit...

Thanks,
Jake

[BarryMead]

In the April 6th announcement that the source code would be released Michael Steinmann said:

Michael Steinmann Wrote:In the next few days, we will be releasing the full source code to be able to build your own DM42 firmware. All components of DM42 will be open-sourced. We think that this is the right thing to do and hopefully with the help from community, we can accelerate the development of DM42's software on Github.

Full source code will be available at: http://github.com/swissmicros/DM42.

Personally, I would say that "few days" means 3 to 8 days. It has already been two full weeks and the github page still shows the 404 not found message. I think it is reasonable to request that Swiss Micros update their announcement if additional delays are expected. I don't mind patiently waiting, but I would prefer to have a more FOURTHCOMING estimate of how long that wait will be. After all they didn't say "few weeks" they said "few days".