Brendan Minish wrote: > > On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 11:23 +0200, Simon Brown (HB9DRV) wrote: > > >> > For this to occur there needs to be a lot more dialogue and ideas >> > sharing between developers of open source ham radio software. >> > >> >> Herding cats may well be easier. You're always welcome to write the >> missing >> killer apps, GNU C++ is free :-) > > Simon, I don't see why it should be so hard for this to work in the area > of ham radio software, Collaboration between developers mostly works > very well in the Open source community. > You can't be serious, Brendan! The main reason Linux is not more popular than it could be is that too much scarce volunteer effort is wasted doing work similar to what has already been done by someone else. So you have 100 different flavours of Linux "distros" all much the same apart from the desktop artwork, instead of one or two really good ones. You have people working independently on KDE and Gnome, instead of pooling resources and creating one killer desktop. And so on.
Of course, I understand the reasons for it. If people are writing code in their own time they want to write what they want, not what someone tells them to write. That's work. I didn't consider collaborating with anyone when I wrote KComm because I had a specific idea of what program I wanted to write. I didn't want to write someone else's program. So I'm as much a part of the problem as anyone else. I still think it's a huge shame that more hams don't use the free tools to write programs for Linux. A free open source operating system developed by people doing it for personal interest seems a better choice for amateur radio than an expensive proprietary one developed by people who just want to make loads of money. If it's a matter that amateur programmers don't have the C/C++ skills then they can use Lazarus, as I have done, which is almost exactly like Delphi (and similar to the early VB, except for the language) and can create programs for Windows, Linux and Mac from the same source code. ----- Julian, G4ILO K3 s/n: 222 K2 s/n: 392 G4ILO's Shack: www.g4ilo.com Zerobeat Ham Forums: www.zerobeat.net/smf -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/ANN%3A-KComm-1.1-released-tp17737451p17752826.html Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
