Re: Announce: new EchoLink Howto
On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 05:41:52PM -0500, w9ya wrote:
> 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).
Well... really, I guess I shouldn't have said it was "open
source" in the sense of the DFSG or Free Software -- but being that it's
shell scripts, it's pretty darn easy to buy a node board, grab the
software and then do whatever the heck you want with it. It falls into
that weird category of "no license whatsoever" software that is of
course, not DFSG-Free -- but still useful. I've been considering
hacking out a bunch of the IRLP stuff and using the software for doing
some private linking of a couple of repeaters point-to-point. Should be
a piece of cake.
As far as their reaction at the booth -- I can't blame them. They were
there to promote the network and grow it, not hand out software. IRLP
is a package right now... you get a board and some software and in
return a bunch of volunteers help you set it up, run it, and handle the
backend server issues. You get free software updates to the code via
rsync, and generally -- it's not about the software. It's about having
a properly working network of VoIP linked repeaters/radios. If they
were curt to some guy who just walked up and wanted their source and
wasn't interested in participating in the network first -- I could
understand that.
BTW: Who did you talk to at the booth? One of the guys there had my
name tag on -- I was supposed to be there, but a straight-through drive
from Denver would have just been too much and my schedule around Dayton
was just too tight. If I'd have made it, maybe I could have had a
better explanation or at least been able to answer some of the questions
folks like yourself might have had about the codebase. Wish I could
have been there.
(I think APRS started out much the same way. I don't remember any
viable completely open source solutions for APRS for many years after
Bob created it. I never did hear how or when that changed, though. How
is Bob handling APRS stuff? Was it just reverse-engineered by the
open-source folks, or ???)
The "one distro" reasoning has a LOT more to do with support
than anything else -- the volunteers (myself included) in many cases
have to ask node owners/operators if we can ssh to their machine to help
them fix problems. Remember, 90% of the people running IRLP have never
seen Unix/Linux before in their lives. Asking them to do a simple "ls"
can be a two-hour ordeal if you're wondering what their file permissions
look like if you're troubleshooting with them. Having all the nodes
running the same distro is a plus, in this particular case. I spent
three hours on the phone in two sessions last week explaining to one ham
why double-NAT (one from his Sprint router, one in his Linksys) was
going to make getting the port-forwarding necessary to run a server like
IRLP, quite difficult.
Remember, we're dealing with the Ham Radio "appliance operator"
generation here, that and the older generation that is frightened by a
command line, and is happy to just do e-mail on a M$ Windows machine.
And quite frankly, having tools to autodetect hardware and sound cards
is a godsend that many distros (including Debian) simply don't deal with
well. Especially when the choice was made to use RedHat over four years
ago in the project... (some of the first IRLP nodes ran RedHat 5.0
series code, and it really took off around RedHat 6.2. Potato was out
at the time and it wasn't even close to being "easy to install" enough
to consider it for a project where all your free time will get sucked
away by newbie-to-Linux questions about setting up sound cards, etc.
Dave picked what worked best at the time. If Debian has been best at
installation for newbies, it probably would have gotten used.
I honestly believe that certain smart folks could reproduce everything
it does in about a week of coding. Just no one's done it. Maybe I'm
hoping you'll be interested enough to try it out. I gain nothing if you
do, I'm just saying "come on, have some fun".
Meanwhile, two or three node owners do have it running on Debian with a
bunch of tweaking and messing around with it. I think all the
approaches to doing it were custom, and not via a .deb -- which would be
a nice way to go. It runs from /home/irlp which drives the filesystem
purists crazy though -- me included. :-)
73,
--
Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com>, WY0X
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