Looks nice!

what are the chances that in the future, it becomes sort sort of layer that goes over the original nspire_emu so people can still use it but with kArmTI skin support?

As this fork of an open source software is closed source, AFAICT and at the time of this writing, basically zero chances. That's precisely why I raised the matter: kArmTI brings some useful features, and we can do much better than seeing them go to waste in the short term, or having to spend a fair bit of time reimplementing them

Or are you planning to eventually make it open source, available on GitHub or something so that multiple people can help if you get too busy?

FWIW, the fact that ncubate has always been open source is what made it possible to integrate most of its distinctive features (first and foremost, the GDBstub, but there are several other changes) into a newer version of the emulator. The integration was done by someone else than ExtendeD.

Also note that I don't think anybody should try to discourage anyone from working on an alternate emulator.

Indeed. I don't think you were targetting me, but anyhow, I do not aim at discouraging people from working on alternate emulators. An alternate emulator can prove useful; but less so if it's based on outdated versions, and even less so when it soon becomes unmaintained
I suggest that those who work on alternate emulators communicate (more, or at all) with upstream, so as to avoid basing their work on outdated versions.


I'm no free software extremist, I happily use some proprietary bits on my Linux machines and I'm very far from trolling message boards on FLOSS/proprietary matters at every occasion. Still, I think that the fact that kArmTI is, at the time of this writing, a proprietary fork of an open source software, is doing more harm than good... and we should fix that, IMO.

I think you guys are misunderstanding Lionel. He is not disliking/bashing kArmTI, but is trying to secure its future. If kArmTI stays closed source, OR the author doesn't communicate with upstream there is A VERY BIG chance it will get outdated and die eventually. Lionel is just warning you for this, and trying to help you by giving some good advice.

I think kArmTI is great, but Lionel made some points that realy need to be considered.

"upstream" doesn't refer to any particular application, or something like that; it's just a term used for software upon which another piece of software is based. it's thus named because any changes to a project that's "upstream" to add bugfixes and improvements will affect everything "downstream," often requiring modifications to the downstream projects in order for them to keep up to date.

the concern lionel and jimb are presenting is that, if a project remains closed source, the creator can easily become bored of working on it and cease making updates, and everyone else will not be able to do anything about it. this becomes a problem because changes upstream will no longer be implemented in the downstream application, and thus the end users will not be able to enjoy the improvements made in the upstream version. making a project open source, in an already profit-free situation like this one, just means that, if you get bored in the future, or if you just need some help, other people can help keep the project up to date.

By now, I've been a member of the TI community for more than 11 years. In that long period, I've seen way too many projects fade away because the maintainer went away for whatever reason (including illness or death, we've had several), lost the sources due to a hard drive crash (calc84maniac's GB/GBC emulator, a TI-Z80 emulator better than TI's, and his projects for emulating TI-68k calculators and the GBA; the TimeToTeam's work on a large game for TI-68k calculators), or such reasons. An awful lot of time lost (due to risks not avoided / mitigated), and needless to say, not all of it reimplemented. After calc84maniac's hard drive crash, no GBA emulator for two years, until he restarted working on it !

That may seem "speculating a lot without sound foundament" and "pure conjectures" to you, but from my POV, that's just "trying to benefit from experience return on past _real_ events (which are more likely than you seem to think !) by setting procedures not make the same kind of mistakes again (or at least, make it less likely that they occur with large impact)"...
A well-known effective measure against those problems is the combination of making backups on multiple locations, and "publishing" the sources / patches / whatever, either privately (through e.g. e-mail) or publicly. I'm using that measure myself, not only in my job as a professional software developer (corporations try to reduce time and money lost due to risks of everyday life [EDIT: and unreliable hardware]), but also for my free time projects - multiple members of the community can testify to the latter.

But relative newcomers are free to choose to ignore the wisdom of old-timers


The subject is terminated from my side as well. I've made explicit, from the very first post ( http://ourl.ca/16585/310698 ), that there's value in kArmTI; and yet, SpiroH, fhub consider that I don't like kArmTI (??! - I could just have ignored the matter instead of raising it myself before it bites, I had already talked about my concerns to other persons !), and DJ_O considers that I'm trying to debate whether OSS is better in general... It's not very nice to see my explicit statements being misrepresented that way - all the more jimbauwens and shmibs seem to have understood my points, so it doesn't seem that I've totally failed at communicating my thoughts, and that I've warranted a moderator warning.

EDIT: split the misrepresentations of SpiroH and fhub on the one side, and DJ_O on the other side.

Lionel I wasn't saying you were attacking kArmTI, I was saying SpiroH felt offended by your comments, and that because of this, it would be better to answer his wish of ending the discussion.

Could we make a new topic (or move some of the related discussion to another so that it doesn't all have to be re-posted) if we want to continue discussing about Open vs closed source software?