[Elecraft] Elecraft Digest, Vol 124, Issue 10

[Ray Sills]

HI Andrew:

Well, we all can have our opinions about "list priority"... but in the  
end, it's up to Elecraft (Wayne and Eric), with feedback from  
customers and employees.

With regard to Elecraft "open-sourcing" their firmware.... don't count  
on it.  Especially if you like to have the current level of support.   
Let's see how Ten Tec fares with their open source rig.

As far as I can see, Elecraft is quite responsive to feature requests  
and bug fixes.  People often point to a -lack- of response from other  
manufacturers... including fixing -known- issues.  They just continue  
to make the same broken products.

In the end, things have been working quite well for Elecraft from a  
business perspective.  I doubt there would be any desire to change  
anything that "isn't broken" from their perspective, and from the  
perspective of most customers.

73 de Ray
K2ULR
KX3 #211


On Aug 19, 2014, at 3:33 AM, Andrew White wrote:

>>
>>
>>
>> to quote Wayne from 7/10/2014 7:55 PM
>>
>> <quote>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Our firmware task lists are sorted by priority. Determination of
>> Priority is democratic to some degree (Squeaky Wheel and other  
>> industry
>> standard methodologies). But in practice it involves
>> crystal-ball-gazing, head-counting, arm-wrestling-over-a-beer, and a
>> healthy dose of what-we-have-time-for.
>>
>> It is not practical for us to publish the lists.
>
>
> That is nonsense. There are plenty of tools to easily track issues and
> feature requests in a way that is no burden on your time. The best  
> thing
> you could do is open source your firmware on GitHub and let other  
> people
> start working on issues.
>
>
>
>> They change daily and
>> contain a lot of firmware-speak. We'd rather spend time actually  
>> making
>> changes than on sanitizing lists for public consumption.
>>
>
> That is a job all in itself. It is called Product Management. If you  
> don't
> have anyone that does that full time now you should hire someone to  
> do it.
> If engineers are doing that now they should most definitely not be  
> doing it.
>
>
>>
>>
>> On 8/14/2014 4:55 PM, Sam Morgan wrote:
>>> I doesn't have anything to do with one of their new products, so  
>>> there
>>> is no reason to waste electrons asking or commenting.
>>>
>>> They will get around to it when and if they ever decide to, or are
>>> allowed to, work on something P3 or K3 related, and no amount of  
>>> asking
>>> will change that.
>>>
>>
>
> No actually your premise is completely wrong. It will change that.  
> Products
> live and die by the feedback customers give to the company. With no  
> public
> issue tracking service offered by Elecraft of course it is going to  
> look
> like a black box when in reality the lack of transparency for change
> requests is hurting the product.
>
> People are making their own 3rd party products for Elecraft (for the  
> KX3
> for example) because "crystal-ball-gazing, head-counting,
> arm-wrestling-over-a-beer, and a healthy dose of what-we-have-time- 
> for"
> doesn't scale.
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