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Lost interest when I saw rewards that include "logins" and "licenses" combined with no mention of plans to open source.

I don't mind (and on occasion actually enjoy) paying to help develop or maintain software, ditto to help develop, maintain, or manufacture hardware. But something like this should be fully hackable, and these days I won't pay for anything less.

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It is based on the arm mbed system.

http://mbed.org/blog/entry/Robotiky-Robot-Kickstarter/

So it is fully hackable running anything you write on that.

From your link, emphasis mine, "The team prototyped the idea using an mbed-enabled NXP LPC1768 prototyping board, and then transitioned to a full custom design using the mbed HDK for NXP LPC11U24 board based on an ARM Cortex-M0+."

So the hardware may support hacking, but their software isn't designed to be hacked (e.g., requiring licenses).

I think it is important that the hardware is based on a big opensource platform – it means you are never going to have an expensive paperweight. With the software it is transitioning to use standard programming languages – so you get the full hackability of those later on. If there was sufficient demand from users then the software could be open sourced – definitely intend for people to be able to create their own programs and share them.

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