[Elecraft] Elecraft KX4

[David Woolley]

In my experience, radio amateurs behave like the general public with 
respect to intellectual property; they generally only respect property 
rights in physical objects.  They'll copy magazine articles without 
paying royalties to publisher, play videos at clubs in spite of the home 
use only warnings, etc.

Much experimentation with equipment is probably legally dodgy, although 
I think there are patent exemptions for experimentation, but possibly 
not for subsequent use beyond validating the design,

In terms of only supporting official versions, there are techniques, 
such as digital signatures, to identify official firmware, even if 
people violate trademarks.  Android is open source, but is still trusted 
for some secure applications.

I suspect ELecraft do actually support modified hardware, which most 
people wouldn't.

Incidentally a lot of the original developers of the internet (before 
commercialisation) were radio amateurs.  One of the big reasons that we 
have TCP/IP now and not something based on X.25, and the OSI model, is 
the open source nature of the key implementations.

-- 
David Woolley

On 01/07/2019 19:10, Alan wrote:
> The software was copyrighted, but that didn't prevent some hams (in 
> Germany as I recall) from running a reverse compiler on the code, making 
> a few minor changes, and re-compiling it so they could make pirate chips.