From TI-BANK news, we learn that in France, Texas Instruments had promotions where they send calculator buyers a sales tax refund after purchase. However, all the time they would fail to send the refunds in time. People had to complain on TI France Facebook page and then TI sent them their refund almost immediately. Otherwise, buyers were left waiting and waiting. This practice is very common with North American companies and in most cases, people never actually get their mail-in rebate. Unfortunately, it seems that the company that produces most of our beloved calculators also does that.

However, it also appears that in 2009, there was a scam contest called TI-S'engage (TI Gets Involved, if translated in English). People who participated never got their prizes and the results were never published. We do not know if this competition was created by TI themselves, because according to WHOIS tools, the contest website IP address doesn't match education.ti.com, but rather www.kickers.fr and www.galeries-bartoux.fr. However, it seemed suspicious when TI-BANK team decided to contact Texas Instruments and never actually received any reply, even though when I received TI newsletters linking to an unknown domain name, I got a response from them confirming these newsletters were erroneously sent to me by them. Today, TI-BANK team has yet to receive any answer from TI about that contest. If this contest was a hoax where Texas Instruments is not involved, then why didn't they reply telling them they did not organize that contest?

In addition to that, it appears that TI may be violating the BSD license, according to people who decrypted the TI-Nspire OS to analyze text messages in it. This is assuming that TI doesn't use a recent one, though.

Although we do not know if TI deliberately decided to not send tax refunds to people in time, organized the TI-S'Engage contest themselves nor still violates the BSD license in their new OSes, it might make it harder for future customers to trust them, should a lot of word to mouth happen outside the Internet.

Original article about this can be located at http://ti.bank.free.fr/index.php?mod=news&ac=commentaires&id=920

http://ourl.ca/6366/127170

But according to Goplat on IRC/OmnomIRC, if TI uses a recent BSD license, they might be fine.

EDIT: Link added to news.

This is shocking (the OS not much, but the scam thing quite a lot).

Maybe, but I think TI was just being a jerk and didn't respond.

Quote from: Binder News on January 11, 2011, 09:09:30 am

Maybe, but I think TI was just being a jerk and didn't respond.

TI isn't one single person, but an entity. Whomever received the message was the one being the jerk, not TI as a whole.
Of course, that's presuming TI isn't training its employees to be jerks.

Well, TI training people to be jerks would be just as belivable as TI training people to be crappy OS makers.

Yeah, maybe.

Or maybe they just hire those types of people.

They don't even write most of the OSes

At least they use a good RSA key...

Yeah, but only for the Nspire.