Polyend Publishes Tracker Firmware Source Under a Noncommercial Licence, With Two Binary Libraries Left Out

Polyend has put the firmware source for its Tracker line on GitHub as tracker-ce, described on the repository page as the "Official Polyend Tracker Community Editon for all Polyend Tracker devices." The source is licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 with Polyend Additional Permissions, and two precompiled libraries that the build links against are not open at all.

The repository showed two commits, 123 stars and 15 forks when it was read on Nov. 2, and Polyend's GitHub organisation page listed it as last updated that day. No separate announcement was found, so the README is the primary document. For other open-source projects whose licence or release status matters, see the coverage of KDE's Kwi terminal and the AGPL-licensed OmniDiff.

What the licence allows

Firmware source, headers, the Open Synth SDK and docs fall under the PolyForm Noncommercial licence plus Polyend's extra permissions. The README says music creators may use the result commercially, but that selling the firmware or embedding it in competing products is prohibited. A field-of-use restriction like that puts the code in the category usually called source-available, not open source, which is a point for anyone who hoped to fork it into a product.

Component	Licence, per the README
Firmware source, headers, Open Synth SDK, docs	PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 with Polyend Additional Permissions
.ptfx Sample Editor FX SDK (editor-fx-sdk/)	MIT
Precompiled libPolySynth.a and libPolyDSP.a	Separate proprietary licence, for building firmware for authentic Polyend hardware

The two proprietary archives are linked into the build, which means a rebuilt firmware cannot be produced without Polyend's binaries. The README does not list what the libraries contain. Polyend also states that community firmware is provided "AS IS" and that it has no obligation to provide support.

The build and flash route

The README targets three hardware families. The original Tracker uses an NXP Kinetis MK66FX1M0, a Cortex-M4F at 180 MHz. The Tracker+ and Tracker Mini use an NXP i.MX RT1051 or RT1064, a Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz.

Building needs the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10, make and python3, with targets named make original, make plus, make mini and make ptfx. The output is a .ptf file in build/. To install it, a user copies the file to /Firmware/ on the microSD card and runs Config > Firmware > Firmware update, keeping the filename to 31 characters or fewer. For a bad build, the README says to place a known-good .ptf there and press the hardware emergency bootloader button.

Contributions are welcome under a CONTRIBUTING.md that covers a hardware testing workflow. Major structural changes are supposed to start in GitHub Discussions or the Polyend Backstage forum.

Why the community had been working around it

On Aug. 5, 2025, a forum user, Origami_Poltergeist, replied on a Backstage thread asking for the source: "they decided against it." That is a user's reply, not a Polyend statement. Another poster on the thread described opening formerly commercial software as "not trivial," citing shared code across devices and licensing.

In the meantime a clean-room project, OpenTracker by sandlbn, has shipped frequent builds for the original Tracker: version 2.2.4 on Nov. 2, after 2.2.3 on Oct. 30. Its page says it "contains no Polyend code, fonts, icons or graphics" and is "written from behavioural specifications." The page does not state a licence.

Tracker-ce changes the choice for someone who wants to modify behaviour on their own unit: they can now start from the maker's code, with the noncommercial and binary-library limits attached, instead of from a reimplementation. Whether Polyend merges outside pull requests is the next thing the repository will show, since it had only two commits on Nov. 2.