Very well put, Ed. I agree with your sentiments about open vs. closed and how it can be applied to different pieces of D-STAR differently, and that was the whole point of my reply and questions.
Comparing D-STAR to iPhone is somewhat an Apples-to-Oranges (pun intended? - GRIN!) comparison though. Try comparing D-STAR development to say, development for a P25 repeater or development for MotoTRBO. Let's stick to similar products doing similar things. In that vein, D-STAR Gateway development is about equal in "open-ness" to paying the fee and becoming a Moto developer. First you have to be a Gateway admin or have access to a Gateway... etc etc etc... the list of "must do's" are pretty long to develop software for the "back end". Also, you're a tiny bit hung up on the On-Air/RF side of things as being open, without realizing that I'm more interested in the server side of things... Yes, the specs are published for the RF protocol (and from what I hear, the specs aren't exactly what Icom implements in their rigs - they add on to it), but *most* folks aren't interested in building radios. What they are interested in is the the things that actually make D-STAR *different*, and those things are handled up at the site in the controller, and in the servers on the Internet... Changes in those are where changes make a significant difference in D-STAR's capabilities. Gateway development is a much more closed environment than the on-air/RF side of things. People are doing it, but it's a "gauntlet" so to speak of reverse-engineering that everyone's "afraid" to document for fear of abuse. The reality is... the on-air protocol and rig implementation is so ripe for abuse, that worrying about gateway abuse is "closing the gate after the sheep got out". P25: Hard to develop for today, but working on a standardized interface for the linking/site side of things. No community or centralized distribution mechanisms, really yet. Maybe after the off-air/hardware/interop specs are published... someday. MotoTRBO: Pay some money, get your SDK and the full specs of how to interoperate with the boxes. Nothing's free. Tons of developers and product already released. Not sure the quality of most of them, reviews of them are a bit light in the press so far. Can find any registered developer's apps on one manufacturer's website... Moto's. "Smells" like a well-run 3rd party developer project, to me, with vendors lining up to create applications and competing, but requires $ to play. D-STAR: Reverse-engineer well enough to be accepted into a small group of developers. Piss them off, lose access. Basically a "morals and talent" gauntlet. Finding out who's part of the clan, is rather difficult. Open-source products are about a 1-to-4 ratio right now out of those folks. Nothing resembling a central repository. "Smells" Amateur-ish to me, which matches what it is. Some of the solutions require $ to play, others are given freely as programs without source, a very small number are open-source. I can't think of any other digital radio systems in wide use to analyze "openness". Those are the "big three" right now for Amateur use, and I'm not "pushing" any particular one. I just like comparing all of them to each other... they're ultimately all in competition for the hearts and minds of Amateurs. D-STAR drops out when you switch to the Commercial world. (Technically you also pick up the Kenwood/Icom partnership of their TDMA-based systems when you cross over from Amateur to Commercial... I haven't seen any significant up-take of the Kenwood/Icom system(s) in the Amateur world. But they do have a digital product pointed squarely at the commercial folks, marketing-wise. I leave it out of the comparisons, because I'm an Amateur and I'm not interested in making anything about my radio hobby Commercial.) Which is better? I don't know... but none of them are truly "open". That's all I was ever saying... And I wasn't trying to piss in anyone's Cheerios. I think we do the world a disservice if we answer "it's all open", when it's not. NONE of the existing systems out there are truly open, 100%. I hold out hope for a truly open-source D-STAR Gateway... that would be a real game-changer. Nate WY0X
