[Elecraft] ANN: KComm 1.1 released [OT]

[G4ILO]

Brendan Minish wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 11:23 +0200, Simon Brown (HB9DRV) wrote:
> 
> 
>> > For this to occur there needs to be a lot more dialogue and ideas
>> > sharing between developers of open source ham radio software.
>> >
>> 
>> Herding cats may well be easier. You're always welcome to write the
>> missing 
>> killer apps, GNU C++ is free :-)
> 
> Simon, I don't see why it should be so hard for this to work in the area
> of ham radio software, Collaboration between developers mostly works
> very well in the Open source community.
> 
You can't be serious, Brendan! The main reason Linux is not more popular
than it could be is that too much scarce volunteer effort is wasted doing
work similar to what has already been done by someone else. So you have 100
different flavours of Linux "distros" all much the same apart from the
desktop artwork, instead of one or two really good ones. You have people
working independently on KDE and Gnome, instead of pooling resources and
creating one killer desktop. And so on.

Of course, I understand the reasons for it. If people are writing code in
their own time they want to write what they want, not what someone tells
them to write. That's work. I didn't consider collaborating with anyone when
I wrote KComm because I had a specific idea of what program I wanted to
write. I didn't want to write someone else's program. So I'm as much a part
of the problem as anyone else.

I still think it's a huge shame that more hams don't use the free tools to
write programs for Linux. A free open source operating system developed by
people doing it for personal interest seems a better choice for amateur
radio than an expensive proprietary one developed by people who just want to
make loads of money. If it's a matter that amateur programmers don't have
the C/C++ skills then they can use Lazarus, as I have done, which is almost
exactly like Delphi (and similar to the early VB, except for the language)
and can create programs for Windows, Linux and Mac from the same source
code.

-----
Julian, G4ILO  K3 s/n: 222 K2 s/n: 392
G4ILO's Shack: www.g4ilo.com
Zerobeat Ham Forums: www.zerobeat.net/smf
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/ANN%3A-KComm-1.1-released-tp17737451p17752826.html
Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com.