Re: Announce: new EchoLink Howto
On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 03:03:44PM -0500, w9ya wrote:
> Um, my complaint is that IRLP is not fully open sourced. I talked with these
> folks at their booth at Hamvention and was left cold with their explanation
> as to why. Um, they were justifying this stance based on a belief that it was
> a more secure network as a result.
I used to have the same reservations, you can look back a couple of
years here in the archives of this list and see my similar rant.
Basically since then, I've run it (and become heavily involved in
helping people set it up) for a couple of years, and have realized that
99.9% of the code *is* open (it's shell scripts, for goodness sakes).
The pieces that are not open source are:
- Whatever changes Dave Cameron made to SpeakFreely to allow it to key
from another binary that watches the bits on the parallel port.
- The "dtmf" binary driver that watches those parallel port bits and
sends them into the software.
Both are infinitely "reverse-engineerable". And a number of hams have
dropped in replacement SpeakFreely binaries of their own making, so
perhaps there really wasn't a change made to that at all? I've never
really investigated.
Basically IRLP is "as close to open-source" as there is out there today,
so I run it. If someone were to come along and start a serious project
to make a fully open system, I'd jump in and help with it -- but I can't
squeeze any more time out of my day to go through the difficult part of
starting a large project. I think any project that started now should
strive for Interoperability between their new project and the existing
ones where possible.
[Side-note: Software called "TheBridge" (on SourceForge I believe) can
already create a conference server that either an EchoLink or IRLP
node can access.]
On the hardware side, IRLP at one point had an open hardware interface
also -- and Dave literally spent EVERY night of the week helping people
who couldn't operate a soldering iron correctly. At great expense to
himself, he had a LOT of nice surface-mount stuffed interface boards
made up and gave up on trying to help today's modern "appliance
operator" ham through soldering a simple two chip board and getting it
working. It was taking up all of his free time. So even though I and
many others have reverse-engineered the hardware interface many times
over, we respect that Dave still has a pile of boards he'd be stuck with
if people didn't buy them. Most of that is just for the sake of
"helping a friend and fellow ham". Goodwill, peace on Earth, all that
stuff.
Let's see... other news... SpeakFreely is officially end-of-lifed. If
the open-source community doesn't pick it up it'll die a slow death.
The author claims this is because the vast majority of network
connections are now NAT'ed making P2P VoIP more and more difficult. In
the case of IRLP, we definitely spend the majority of our time teaching
people how to open the ports necessary and forward them at their
consumer-grade firewall/routers like the Linksys -- and looking at the
EchoLink documentation, those guys do also.
On the server side of things, we've had a lot of luck finding large
bandwidth and server donations, but they don't last. Every year or so
we "lose" a box -- which isn't all that big a deal in the Grand Scheme
of Things, but is a problem for logistics... and of course there's the
inevitable learning curve -- switching from protocols that transferred
whole filesystems to more efficient things like rsync... stuff like
that.
In general, I "do" IRLP now (and for the last two years) because it
interests me, and I really enjoy helping people get their feet wet with
a Linux box who've never seen it before. I also think Dave's
standardization on RedHat has proven to be more of a hindrance than a
help over the last two years -- but I can't imagine walking many of the
newer folks to computers (let alone Linux) through Debian's installer
either. That'd just be an exercise in masochism, even though I love and
use Debian daily myself.
On the other hand there is *absolutely nothing* stopping a completely
open-source project from popping up -- and hasn't been for a couple of
years... just no one has enough interest, time, etc... it would appear.
Meanwhile, I'll keep hacking on IRLP nodes and software when I have
time. It's quite fun to mix my favorite two things, Linux and Ham
Radio.
Now if I could just get that 220 MHz repeater conversion done...
73,
--
Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com>, WY0X
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