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.
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