Re: Announce: new EchoLink Howto
On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 10:17:17PM -0400, Chuck Hemker wrote:
>
> Well, from the README in the source available at
> http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/unix:
Yeah, I double-checked the licenses before I believed it too. Long time
ago. :-) Back around the time of my personal "whaaah - it's not
open-source!" rant. Haha...
Now what I was never quite sure of was whether the Unix version guy's
codebase started from the Windows version and if so when the Windows
version first had a GPL license on it... if the Unix guy took the GPL'ed
code and made a Unix version and released it PD... that's not right.
But couldn't figure that part out and wasn't going to keep making huge
waves to find out.
> Now it would be nice if it was open source and it would handle
> connection requirments like:
> 1. if the person at the other end has an amateur radio license
He runs it as both the "hobby" side and a commercial small biz. He's
got a motivation to know if they're a Ham or not when he sells the
boards. (Hams get better pricing, commercial rates are higher.) So
this acts as a barrier and he gets a callsign and generally checks it
out before the sale is completed for the hardware.
> 2. if the other end is connected to an RF link
That's hard to do in software. How would you recommend we add this
"radio detector" to a computer? :-) Right now, the rules of the
network are RF-only, no headsets, and there's no reasonable way other
than wiring up a PTT for yourself to the IRLP board to trigger the COS.
If you're going to go through that amount of effort - oh well.
> 3. if the other end has a good audio connection to the computer
> by some sort of a trust relationship (who signed the keys for the other
> end) rather than security by obscurity or who bought a board.
You're saying a small group of ever-growing people would double check
another ham's work before "signing them in" to the network? Ohhh man,
that'd be hard... some hams believe their stations sound like golden
beauty itself and they've wired discriminator audio into the sound
card or something equally as nasty... (YUCK!). Then there's the group
that bought a broadcast quality equalizer, and a compressor-limiter so
that nothing going either way is ever over-powering or too quiet...
going to the other end of the extreme for the Ultimate in audio quality.
Hams are a crazy bunch, sometimes!
I don't quite understand that one, maybe. Is that what you were
thinking?
The system as it stands is quite an intricate ecosystem, with a bunch of
odd checks and balances. It would be difficult to reproduce if starting
over again today from scratch... at least the "people part" would be.
There's a whole group of volunteers who work pretty hard on keeping the
servers up, etc... very similar in that regard to Debian itself. And
even the trolls that say it's "too closed" who when pressed will even
say privately that they just expect people to hand over their root
passwords for the core servers so they can start hacking on them... not
too many of those, though. :-) But there's always a few.
In general, it's just "good clean fun" most of the time, which is what
Amateur Radio should be. Some guy just popped up during my morning
drive-time on the local club repeater system from Oslo, Norway and we
chatted for a half hour like it was never any other way...
(And of course, I will agree -- that's not REALLY Amateur Radio -- I'd
rather have made that contact on HF! But fun, anyway. The interesting
trivia of the morning was it was exactly the same temperature here in
Denver as it was in Oslo -- my morning, his evening, right when he
called. 'Cause of course that's one of the *required* (cough) reporting
points of any contact right? ... How's the WX Old Man?) :-) :-) ;-)
--
Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com>, WY0X
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