Development to continue on HRD....

Today, Simon accepted an offer for Mike Carper WA9PIE, Randy Gawtry, K0CBH and Rick Ruhl W4PC to purchase the source and rights to ham Radio Deluxe.

We plan to continue the development and support of this fine product.

 

Care to add a bit more detail to this revelation? Are we to expect that HRD is soon to become a standard, commercial payware (similar to other software on your site) and that major upgrades will be be an additional cost?

This really does not bother me--as I have donated to Simon for years now.

There must be a plan--otherwise the three of you would have not bought the rights.

I just downloaded the latest version--just to be on the safe side...

Also, this thread is being moved to a more appropriate board where it will be noticed.

 

Good to hear that development will continue. Please keep us informed as this is one of the most complete pieces of software for the Ham available.

Many of us would also like to know the answers to the above questions as well.

Jim

 

Yes W4PC...do tell.

 

Details forthcoming. I just ask for everyone's patience. An official announcement will come from myself, Randy and Mike in the next few days.

 

change?

I approach any change with caution -- may the new owners continue the quality of programming that Simon pioneered with HRD - magnificent! Good job and bravo to Simon!

73 wo5t

 

I truly believe this program is the best I have ever had. I am truly a believer in open source/ donation ware. It seems like the free type programs are much better than any of the pays that I have ever bought. I truly hope this does not tarnish this great software! I do not mind paying for HRD, but it does not need to become a "lesser" of a product.

 

This is indeed sad news.

 

Are the agreements that were made with all the large amounts of OPEN SOURCE code that HRD is built upon transferable from Simon to others? I have my doubts.

HRD is built with a ton of open source doing much of the heavy lifting and signal processing under the covers for many things such as the DM780 using the core of FLdigi etc.. My understanding is that Simon obtained personal permission from some of the open source developers to <strike>steal</strike> borrow the code that they wrote in their open source projects to create his free but CLOSED ham radio deluxe product.


I don't think you guys may have gotten license to what you might think you have licensed. If you try to take HRD to be 'commerical' you may have some legal issues that may get the Free Software Foundation lawyers interested.


Simon already ignored the open source licenses and was skirting the edge of licenses by his 'interpretation' that by using separate DLL's the open source licenses were not violated, which according to the FSF, this is false when using GPL libraries. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FSWithNFLibs




The best thing that could happen is that this wakes the Ham Community up to the advantages of rallying behind having COMMUNITY supported Open Source and not 'free' with promises by one or few people.

IF you guys have obtained the rights to keep making HRD free, that I would seriously suggest one of the FIRST things to happen, would be to start working on replacing all the commercial licensed libraries like <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">codejock etc and eliminate their use from the builds by using something like QT instead, and then the entire thing can be open sourced. There is no reason you can't do that other than some alterior motive towards trying to go commercial.


Anyone who is frustrated by the progress of HRD slowing to a halt, just has to ask themselves, imagine what sort of features would have been implemented by now if there were hundreds of people from the ham community working on HRD as an open source project instead of one guy who wanted to keep his code closed in his back pocket.

 

Not judging too quickly...

I believe the core program, what we all start running before anything else, was written by Simon. It provides radio control and the framework to share that control with other programs. I don't believe that the control part of HRD was ever open-sourced. The accessory programs, like DM780 and the logging and satellite stuff may have been open-sourced.

I too enjoy HRD very much for its robust feature set and breadth of supported radios. There is no reason that can't continue in a commercial form. And I won't jump to the conclusion that there is a violation of open-source code, since none of that may have been used in the basic control program to begin with.

Congrats to all involved!

 

If you look their calls up on this site, one of the 3 principals shows 1002531 lookups but in parentheses next to that is the real number (7284).


Makes one wonder.

 

The user can set that number to almost anything they want. Maybe I'll set mine to a billion!!

.................Bob

 

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">Actually, if you look into the people who have obtained the 'rights' to HRD, one of them is W4PC, who ownes the Creative Services Software/W4PC Software Company:
http://www.cssincorp.com/


Which pretty much puts the nail in the coffin for HRD as non-commercial product.

They/He currently tries to sell a pretty poor product compared to HRD for $49 already: http://www.cssincorp.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?pid=59

 

A bit OT, but: What's the point of having a Lookup Count that can be set to any number by the user? It really doesn't mean much, other than that the user may have an over-inflated ego.

Chek mine, for example.

72 de W8BFG
---bernie

 

Uhm . . . . well . . . . if you feel the need!! We aim to please!

I would hope that we all keep patient about what this means to HRD. As anyone who knows who has been using HRD for awhile, there was a rather lengthy period when Simon was working on other projects and HRD languished a bit because of it. The new beta 5.0 version was a major upgrade and recent additions to the award section as well as LoTW brought the logbook package up to speed. While I would hate to see it go "commercial," if that means more attention given the program with more features and updates, then maybe it's a small price to pay. If it isn't being updated, "free" isn't always so good!

.................Bob <------------ patently waiting to see what this all means!