8 ms·

What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Meshtastic is the same. One of the main reasons I got interested in MeshCore

What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Meshtastic is the same. One of the main reasons I got interested in MeshCore was reading the Meshtastic trademark rules and just finding them... really really over the top.

tbyehl 5mo ago
I don't know any of the players but I'd bet they're licensed amateur radio operators.
- fooqux 5mo ago
  So?
  - busterarm 5mo ago
    IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others. That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
    - dostick 5mo ago
      What is IYKYK ? If you know you know?
      - sweetheart 5mo ago
        yeah
      - DrewADesign 5mo ago
        IYKYK
    - jimnotgym 5mo ago
      I have an amateur radio licence and I agree. One reason I rarely operate... I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
      - busterarm 5mo ago
        It's kind of alarming how much more enjoyable the less legal communities in the radio hobby are to spend time around.
        DrewADesign 5mo ago
        I get the sense that a lot of the hams I’ve met have a framed hall-monitor sash from their high school years. I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
      - toyg 5mo ago
        Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
        fragmede 5mo ago
        Hurt people hurt people, as they say. The entire field is held back because of trauma. "I could invent something amazing but get screwed out of it because someone else has money and lawyers" is just no way to live. The problem for radio is I could invent the most magical amazing transmitter, but it's worth absolutely nothing if there's no corresponding receiver. Which is to say, open standards are everything. Meshtastic/MeshCore/etc are interesting because they're open. It doesn't have to be. Off-grid mesh communication is a solved problem, just buy a GoTenna. Problem is it's proprietary. But it works, with a whole lot less drama.
    - bobsomers 5mo ago
      I don't really think its fair to lump hams into that behavioral bucket. It's certainly a personality type that tends to get attracted to lots of different technical hobbies.
      - busterarm 5mo ago
        [flagged]
    - mystraline 5mo ago
      > IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types. I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump. Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community. And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF. I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
      - busterarm 5mo ago
        It's not even just a pro-trump thing. That's not even the thing particularly annoying about hams because that's annoying across all of society. I can tolerate disagreeing with peoples opinions but not disagreeable/disharmonioous behavior. Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny. The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
        deleted 5mo ago
- amatecha 5mo ago
  Actually the opposite, tons of ppl in the meshtastic community (Discord) berate amateur radio operators. I stopped even discussing the subject because of how much derision I observed or was subjected to. Lots of insults and nasty jokes in passing as soon as the topic even comes up whatsoever. Kinda like your post, actually - offhanded derogatory remarks about an entire group of people solely because of the hobby they're involved in.
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    The person in question has many radios in the background of his videos, so maybe the comment you've replied to is into something :P
    - fooqux 5mo ago
      Eh, it's a stereotype. In my opinion, they should always be questioned, especially when it's an unkind one like this. Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
      - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
        Yeah, you're right.
  - atomicthumbs 5mo ago
    is it because amateur radio operators legally have standards they have to comply with?
    - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
      This + amateur radio is designed to be open, no encryption, anyone can talk with anyone, and if you're "being stupid" (to not use other terms), anyone can tell you so. The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
- linsomniac 5mo ago
  I will say in Northern Colorado a LOT of the people involved in the MeshCore are HAMs.
  - neltnerb 5mo ago
    Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam. You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun. I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out. Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing? At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case. So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
    - linsomniac 5mo ago
      I came up with a way to install a repeater 20ft up a mast that's been on top of the building my office is in, but it's been idle since the TV station that used to be in here left. It has decent reachability, but unfortunately it's not at a particularly high point of the city, it has great reacability into the University and can reach my house, but there's a ridge to the south that puts the antenna more like ground level if it was on that ridge.
      - teachrdan 5mo ago
- walrus01 5mo ago
  Speaking as a person who works professionally in fcc part 101 licensed point to point microwave systems carrying IP data, I have less than zero patience for the BS and shenanigans of analog ham radio enthusiasts. They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens. In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
  - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
    That's unique to american hams. Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
    - walrus01 5mo ago
      Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion. I can send an ICMP ping to something I know is in Svalbard Norway across the regular Internet and get a reply, but I don't pin a postcard to a cork board on my wall celebrating my amazing technical accomplishment. Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload. A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
      - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
        Sure, and walking uphill just do walk downhill is pointless too, and people are also bragging they've gone very far uphill to go very far back downhill,... they could be doing much more useful things instead of climbing mt. everest. Why bother, when you're higher than that (almost) every time you fly in a plane? But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube. Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
queenkjuul 5mo ago
All meshtastic code is GPL, the name "meshtastic" is owned by the company that developed it. You can use any of the code, you can't use their name outside their rules. This is absolutely no different than, say, Firefox. The trademark policy is very permissable and you don't even need their permission to use the name on a commercial product. I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.
- toyg 5mo ago
  Nitpicking, but IIRC, Wi-Fi was born largely as a marketing effort rather than a technical one. Interoperability was an afterthought.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    That's overstated. IEEE 802.11 started it all, and they're a standards body. The point of making a standard is to interoperate. Early implementations had problems with interoperability, yes, but interoperability was central to the ecosystem. "Wifi", as in the Wi-fi Alliance was absolutely a marketing thing because need marketing and branding to get consumer adoption but there was also a certification process to it that was a technical process and without that, it wouldn't have worked.
celsoazevedo 5mo ago
For now, I don't think it's fair to compare MeshCore with MeshTastic in terms of enforcement as that has not happened with MeshCore. This seems to be one guy getting a trademark in the UK without the approval of other members of the team. They're not going after anyone. Not yet, at least.
mschuster91 5mo ago
> What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out". Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.
SchemaLoad 5mo ago
I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.
- cge 5mo ago
  In my experience, amateur radio (both licensed and license-free) and 3d printing both seem to have cultural perspectives on open source that differ considerably from the regular open source software community. But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious. What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents. [1]: https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed [2]: https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-connection-request/ https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-...
pwndByDeath 5mo ago
The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm
zobzu 5mo ago
they all hope to make lot of money of of it. meshcore has a marketing team spamming reddit all day and a mao to make you believe people use it right now. then you connect to yhe mesh and you're utterly alone there. at least meshtastic has real users lol.

tbyehl 5mo ago

I don't know any of the players but I'd bet they're licensed amateur radio operators.

fooqux 5mo ago
So?
- busterarm 5mo ago
  IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others. That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
  - dostick 5mo ago
    What is IYKYK ? If you know you know?
    - sweetheart 5mo ago
      yeah
    - DrewADesign 5mo ago
      IYKYK
  - jimnotgym 5mo ago
    I have an amateur radio licence and I agree. One reason I rarely operate... I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
    - busterarm 5mo ago
      It's kind of alarming how much more enjoyable the less legal communities in the radio hobby are to spend time around.
      - DrewADesign 5mo ago
        I get the sense that a lot of the hams I’ve met have a framed hall-monitor sash from their high school years. I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
    - toyg 5mo ago
      Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - fragmede 5mo ago
        Hurt people hurt people, as they say. The entire field is held back because of trauma. "I could invent something amazing but get screwed out of it because someone else has money and lawyers" is just no way to live. The problem for radio is I could invent the most magical amazing transmitter, but it's worth absolutely nothing if there's no corresponding receiver. Which is to say, open standards are everything. Meshtastic/MeshCore/etc are interesting because they're open. It doesn't have to be. Off-grid mesh communication is a solved problem, just buy a GoTenna. Problem is it's proprietary. But it works, with a whole lot less drama.
  - bobsomers 5mo ago
    I don't really think its fair to lump hams into that behavioral bucket. It's certainly a personality type that tends to get attracted to lots of different technical hobbies.
    - busterarm 5mo ago
      [flagged]
  - mystraline 5mo ago
    > IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types. I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump. Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community. And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF. I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
    - busterarm 5mo ago
      It's not even just a pro-trump thing. That's not even the thing particularly annoying about hams because that's annoying across all of society. I can tolerate disagreeing with peoples opinions but not disagreeable/disharmonioous behavior. Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny. The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
      - deleted 5mo ago
amatecha 5mo ago
Actually the opposite, tons of ppl in the meshtastic community (Discord) berate amateur radio operators. I stopped even discussing the subject because of how much derision I observed or was subjected to. Lots of insults and nasty jokes in passing as soon as the topic even comes up whatsoever. Kinda like your post, actually - offhanded derogatory remarks about an entire group of people solely because of the hobby they're involved in.
- celsoazevedo 5mo ago
  The person in question has many radios in the background of his videos, so maybe the comment you've replied to is into something :P
  - fooqux 5mo ago
    Eh, it's a stereotype. In my opinion, they should always be questioned, especially when it's an unkind one like this. Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
    - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
      Yeah, you're right.
- atomicthumbs 5mo ago
  is it because amateur radio operators legally have standards they have to comply with?
  - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
    This + amateur radio is designed to be open, no encryption, anyone can talk with anyone, and if you're "being stupid" (to not use other terms), anyone can tell you so. The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
linsomniac 5mo ago
I will say in Northern Colorado a LOT of the people involved in the MeshCore are HAMs.
- neltnerb 5mo ago
  Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam. You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun. I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out. Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing? At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case. So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
  - linsomniac 5mo ago
    I came up with a way to install a repeater 20ft up a mast that's been on top of the building my office is in, but it's been idle since the TV station that used to be in here left. It has decent reachability, but unfortunately it's not at a particularly high point of the city, it has great reacability into the University and can reach my house, but there's a ridge to the south that puts the antenna more like ground level if it was on that ridge.
    - teachrdan 5mo ago
walrus01 5mo ago
Speaking as a person who works professionally in fcc part 101 licensed point to point microwave systems carrying IP data, I have less than zero patience for the BS and shenanigans of analog ham radio enthusiasts. They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens. In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
- ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
  That's unique to american hams. Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
  - walrus01 5mo ago
    Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion. I can send an ICMP ping to something I know is in Svalbard Norway across the regular Internet and get a reply, but I don't pin a postcard to a cork board on my wall celebrating my amazing technical accomplishment. Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload. A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
    - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
      Sure, and walking uphill just do walk downhill is pointless too, and people are also bragging they've gone very far uphill to go very far back downhill,... they could be doing much more useful things instead of climbing mt. everest. Why bother, when you're higher than that (almost) every time you fly in a plane? But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube. Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.

queenkjuul 5mo ago

All meshtastic code is GPL, the name "meshtastic" is owned by the company that developed it. You can use any of the code, you can't use their name outside their rules. This is absolutely no different than, say, Firefox. The trademark policy is very permissable and you don't even need their permission to use the name on a commercial product. I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.

toyg 5mo ago
Nitpicking, but IIRC, Wi-Fi was born largely as a marketing effort rather than a technical one. Interoperability was an afterthought.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  That's overstated. IEEE 802.11 started it all, and they're a standards body. The point of making a standard is to interoperate. Early implementations had problems with interoperability, yes, but interoperability was central to the ecosystem. "Wifi", as in the Wi-fi Alliance was absolutely a marketing thing because need marketing and branding to get consumer adoption but there was also a certification process to it that was a technical process and without that, it wouldn't have worked.

celsoazevedo 5mo ago

For now, I don't think it's fair to compare MeshCore with MeshTastic in terms of enforcement as that has not happened with MeshCore. This seems to be one guy getting a trademark in the UK without the approval of other members of the team. They're not going after anyone. Not yet, at least.

mschuster91 5mo ago

> What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out". Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.

SchemaLoad 5mo ago

I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.

cge 5mo ago
In my experience, amateur radio (both licensed and license-free) and 3d printing both seem to have cultural perspectives on open source that differ considerably from the regular open source software community. But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious. What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents. [1]: https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed [2]: https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-connection-request/ https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-...

pwndByDeath 5mo ago

The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm

zobzu 5mo ago

they all hope to make lot of money of of it. meshcore has a marketing team spamming reddit all day and a mao to make you believe people use it right now. then you connect to yhe mesh and you're utterly alone there. at least meshtastic has real users lol.