A green light for free-software defined radio? [LWN.net]

A green light for free-software defined radio?

Posted Jul 8, 2007 1:37 UTC (Sun) by pascal.martin (guest, #2995)
In reply to: A green light for free-software defined radio? by drag
Parent article: A green light for free-software defined radio?

I certainly do not want to badmouth SDR. The army invented them for good reasons, and the future sounds very exciting.

My whole point is that the FCC does not want modifiable 100% open source software: either the software is locked on the device or else the driver is not open source and the hardware spec is not public.

Either case, open source developers are left out.

I know about GNU radio. For the time being this is hobbyist equipment. Volume distribution could be well declared illegal by the FCC. This is the message being sent out.

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A green light for free-software defined radio?

Posted Jul 8, 2007 17:36 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I know..

It's just the whole thing pisses me off.

What sort of sense does it make to have a non-elected government body have massive amount of control over...

the design and manufacture of so many devices,
be able to dictate who and who is not allowed to know how these devices work,
what people are allowed to say, do or see, with these devices,
controlled a shared human resource and sell it out to the highest bidder,
etc etc.

It's completely absurd. FCC and government regulation and control is doing a massive amount of damage to innovation and the ability for people to communicate freely with one another.

I don't mind having orginization to help set standards, do proper regulation so that inviduals and companies can't abuse the spectrum and hurt everybody else's ability to use it... but right now we have regulations over the use of radio that are 70 years obsolete and were dubious in the first place!