I am excited to hear about the possibility of ITAR not restricting open source satellite work.
You can see a similar excitement in how AMSAT talks about the Linear Transponder Module and the possibility of seeing that module in multiple unique university satellites.
Just imagine if instead of having to hand hold every university who was interested in the AMSAT LTM in their efforts to use the module, if instead its design was published online for free for anyone to use.
Imagine people launching sats using it you didn't even know were going to be launched. Imagine they found issues or ways to improve it, and just submitted design changes back to you for free. Not to mention you get to see and use your technology in additional sats you didn't have the funds to build or launch.
It's hard to know what went wrong with AO-95, but imagine if the Fox designs were open source and others were launching Fox sats and made small changes to the antenna design, or other suspect components, to see if it avoided that issue. You could perhaps figure out what caused the issue over time, not to mention, have a lot more sats to operate.
I'm also envisioning AMSAT-NA working with all the other AMSAT groups around the world, and many different universities around the world, on the best sat designs for different categories. You could build the most dependable possible FM sats, linear sats, and more complex sats like the GOLF project describes.
If it is at all possible to get around ITAR so sats can be developed the open source way, I think it would be wildly beneficial.
73, John Brier KG4AKV