It's also easy to overwhelm reviewers with far more code than they can possibly review. And it's also the hardest stuff to review where the code at surface level looks totally fine, but takes long hours of actual testing to make sure it works.
I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.
In my experience, amateur radio (both licensed and license-free) and 3d printing both seem to have cultural perspectives on open source that differ considerably from the regular open source software community.
But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious.
What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents.
If it's done in a background process then it won't impact the speed of the tool at all. When the choice is between getting data to help improve the tool at the cost of "bad manners" whatever that means, the choice is pretty easy.
What people say, and what people do are different things. Especially when the people who agree to talk to you aren't representative of the whole user base.
And neither does Google. The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. The latest version of iOS supports my iPad released in 2019.
It's a deal when they stop updating. It is true they provide OS updates for longer than most, but many people use devices, especially ipads for way longer than the OS supported period. And those people are stuck on an old unsupported browser without being able to update or install a 3rd party one.
Chrome and Google being bad doesn't make Apple's restrictions good. That said, Android lets you install a 3rd party browser which can choose to keep supporting old devices. iOS locks everything to using the safari engine.
"Good enough" bridges still last 50+ years. We could design a bridge to last 200 years but we won't even know if the design we have today will even be needed in 200 years. Maybe by then we all use trains in underground tunnels.
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