Issue #44: Copycats Stomp on Ham Radio Innovation

It's difficult enough when it works as it is supposed to.

Patent trolls and east Texas courts make it worse by 10x. Or they did, until 2014, Alice vs CPS Bank, which undid business methods ("on a computer") and many software patents.



They're still trying, though it looks like the legislation won't get out of committee this session.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/19/congress-poised-to-bring-back-unfettered-patent-trolling/

And don't get started on other IP, like trademarks and copyrights. Design patents, sheesh.

 

Before Apple and Jonie Ivy was Braun’s
Dieter Rams with some really cool radio designs. His 10 principles have stood the test of time. Apple publishes some excellent design guidelines.

Your HT analogy is excellent. I have ham friends with Yeasu HT’s who inadvertently get them into modes they cannot get out of without referring to the user manual.

It’s telling that there is a cottage industry publishing guides on how to use amateur radio transceivers.

 

Beautiful radios!

 

With the hardware and software available and well documented, and with a permissive open source license, it's hard to prevent abuse. A non commercial use clause is not open source compatible and so many will not contribute to a project with one. Furthermore, most want to buy a finished product so inevitably some commercial exploitation is necessary to offer finished units for sale. You then run into the question of who is allowed to profit from other's work.

A possible solution is to allow for commercial use and work with vendors to ensure a good product is sold. One might even have a trademark applied to approved versions. The legal and regulatory apparatus needed to set this up is beyond the means of most small open source projects. Furthermore, enforcing trademark violations is playing whack a mole at best, and futile and expensive at worst. Even luxury brands such as Apple and Rolex struggle with knockoffs and they have armies of lawyers and a huge incentive to protect their brand.

You can go closed source but then you are on your own and you are competing with other commercial manufacturers like ICOM and Yaesu. If you find a niche that's great but your situation will always be precarious.

I think the only practical way to make these projects work is to have them community based rather than brand based. The product is really a community that shares and maintains the project, not the project itself, and the goal should be to get interested people connected to the community. Open source lends itself perfectly to this model, and I think if you examine the real structure of open source projects, this is how they work. Trying to create a separate identity for the project outside of the community does not work as without the community, the project is a heap of code and documents.

The Internet has made this model possible and I can't think of a single open source project that would be viable without it, so it's best to lean into it rather than try to make open source into something it is not.

73,
Dan
KW4TI

 

I keep seeing a lot of terms like "abuse" being used in these posts. IF the designer wants protection for their design then Open Source is NOT the way to go! Unfortunately, if you don't have the resources, legal and otherwise, of a large corporation, protecting your design is nearly impossible.

Open Source encourages innovation and improvement but leaves the door wide open to commercial use.

 

I think it should be distinguished what one is legally permitted to do and what is considerate to others. Open source work is often unpaid volunteer work, and much of that work underlies the communication medium this message is on. So whether it's users know it or not, they rely on the good will of volunteers for the services they enjoy. Those volunteers usually take pride in their work and do not want the results corrupted by poor implementations that dont represent the work as intended. So I think while one could dismiss the sentiments of these volunteers, they may decide that they don't want the trouble and stop working. I think that would be unfortunate, because a volunteer who has a passion for their work often is more conscientious than a developer doing the minimum for a paycheck.

Unfortunately this kind of poor representation is difficult to prevent with open source projects which by their nature are permissive. One just has to have excited users and developers to promote the real thing better than some generic aliexpress listing. Those who do their homework will almost certainly realize the risks of buying from some anonymous vendor, but you can not prevent someone from purchasing a seductively cheap but junk radio.

This passion is why you find much drama surrounding some open source projects but at least people care. Apathy or disinterest is far worse.

73,
Dan
KW4TI

 

I found the boards for sale on www.kitsandparts.eu
Don't know if that helps, judging by the web address it must be in Europe.
Maybe get the Gerbers and DIY
Good luck all!
Chris CT7AMT

 

Nice article Dave!
I think blaming the Chinese is an easy out, as this is a very old problem.

You can find it going back to your article on innovators.
You can hear it in songs.
You can see it in books.
You can see it in the Tech world.

People either come up with the same idea (or similar ideas), or revise someone else's good idea, and it's the 1st one to the patent office/market that wins the coin.
And the Patent Office is a tar pit of ideas - Many go in, but few are developed before the patent expires.
Many innovations have either suffered from not making it to market, competitors preventing it from coming to market, or the idea being swallowed by someone else.
One only needs to look at Apple and Microsoft, watch the development of both platforms to see how many companies and ideas they buried to rise to where they are now.

Open Source development ownership is like publishing your un-watermarked pictures on social media - they are no longer yours.
There was a high profile case of a modern photographer who donated her most famous pieces to the Guggenheim - unsigned. She was later startled to find that Getty Publishing was selling them as "Stock" photos. It was never her intent that they be resold, and took them to court. Getty won.

 

Hi Ron, thanks for the quality input. Yes, I asked at the end of the article about this question…. It’s so easy to blame the Chinese cloners as there are so many. I wanted to be fair, and perhaps you caught me being a bit lazy here. Yes, anyone can take from the public domain - adapt and sell, it’s their right. But it still sucks when it degrades innovation, doesn’t it? Dmitry and team put together some great designs, with a number of true differences for the AR operator. Those differences essentially disappeared from the market as a result of the Open Source development process. While technically no one can bitch about it, I think Dmitri is owed that much …. a chance to tell the world what COULD have been with the WOLF transceiver.

Dave, W7DGJ

 

Sometimes it works the other way too. Billions of hours of open source R&D (via Grassroots motorsports) have went into vehicles we drive today.
We credit it to the Manufacture, but they stand on the works of regular joe innovators like Dmitri.

Who knows, when the time is right his OS teams ideas may rise again; like so many like him in the past, he just won't get credit for them.

 

Sad but true. There are so many "regular Joe" innovators out there . . . not just in ham radio, but all around us. It's a human condition - the desire to improve the apparatus we use in our lives. Dave, W7DGJ