Re: Announce: new EchoLink Howto
On Sunday 28 September 2003 04:12 pm, Nate Duehr wrote:
> 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.
Huh, well why then , when I asked did they tell me that I couldn't get a
package with the code to add to my favorite linux distro.? "They" also
specifically told me it was closed sourced and that I would need to run it
on Red Hat (personal ug).
Oh well !
73;
Bob
w9ya
>
> 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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