[Elecraft] K2: Firmware Escrow

[David Woolley]

A bit late in terms of buying or not, but is there any escrow 
arrangement for the K2 firmware?

I appreciate that there is an awkward conflict between "amateur" and 
"business" in amateur radio based businesses which often manifests in 
keeping software and firmware secret.  However, I come from the software 
world, and in all the software companies I've worked for escrow 
arrangements have been essential for the products that they have 
developed, in order to give buyers confidence that they won't suddenly 
be left in the lurch.

This has been raised before for Elecraft, see 
<http://www.ac6rm.net/mailarchive/html/elecraft-list/2002-12/msg00577.html>,
but the thread got side tracked.

Basic escrow arrangements only cover the total collapse of the business, 
but a common scenario I see with businesses being taken over is that 
their original product line disappears without trace after six months to 
a year, so ideally escrow terms should also release the code if the 
successor in title to the intellectual property fails to make updates 
available on reasonable terms.  A typical risk is that a competitor buys 
the company out and then it becomes impossible to update the equipment 
when the legislators extend a band; with a purely hardware solution, it 
would often be easy for someone to come up with a modification.

Even without a takeover, I suspect there are two people without whom the 
business couldn't continue.

What I believe some open source projects do is have a trust that 
actually owns the copyright in the software.  As I understand it you 
actually create a trust when you give software to an escrow company, 
but, I presume, one could also create a ones own trust to escrow the one 
piece of software.  I'm not a lawyer though.

If you aren't prepared to go the whole way, releasing, or at least 
escrowing, the detailed documentation for the AuxBus protocol would mean 
it would only be necessary to re-implement one chip's firmware, not all 
of the firmware, to reflect changes that only affect one chip.

Note, I've assumed that you have turned on copy protection on the 
microcontrollers, although I haven't tried to read them.
-- 
David Woolley
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