On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 7:21 AM Joseph Armbruster < josepharmbruster@gmail.com> wrote:
You did not really answer the first question: "How does AMSAT benefit by pursuing an open source policy?"
Oh, come on, Joseph. Getting out from under ITAR would be a really big deal for AMSAT, and that is enough of an answer. I can add that a public benefit non-profit should actually *be* of public benefit, and granting its work to the public is how it does that. And there is a vast Open Source collaboration on satellites and radio that AMSAT is mostly not part of. This has resulted in GNU Radio (Michelle serves on their board) and complete satellite designs. As I mentioned in another post, there are also Open Source thruster designs which I support, and having the ability to change orbit, maintain your orbit, avoid a collision, and deorbit using them is a big deal.
I had been through a similar discussion with a private company that I
worked for about a 3D visualization
Yes, but that was a private company. There is way too much private company thinking around here! We aren't a private company and should not act like one.
One comment on what you said about GPL "you use the GPL where you want companies to participate more, rather than just take your stuff and modify it in private, never returning anything." This is a common misunderstanding / mis-representation of what the GPL does.
Ahem. You really do not have to school me about the GPL, and this is sort of insulting in that way. Yes, I know that there are ways in which sometimes people don't have to give back. There are also disadvantages to them if they work that way, one being that they must re-port their version to every new one released by the public project, if they want the improvements made by the public project, which are often desirable and sometimes have security implications.
The fact is that there has been a many-times multiplier of my one month of evenings creating Busybox and the subsequent work by embedded systems companies and public projects. I wrote the first 35 commands into Busybox. It was at 135 the last time I looked, and is probably a lot more now. This is entirely because of GPL. It also spawned several other projects including an embedded libc and a program that builds your whole embedded system for you.
On the whole protesting of ITAR/EAR and Defense Distributed, when you say the Federal Government lost, from a practical standpoint, that's not really true.
And not entirely relevant to AMSAT, since we are not making firearms and don't have *states* chomping at the bit to sue us. We have an entirely Federal issue. I know legal hardship very well, having just won a GPL-related suit. But the fact is that the path I laid out explicitly follows the law and has little chance of legal hardship.
Because if the wrong politically-motivated person in the Department of Whatever (or friend of a girlfriend of a mistress of whomever) gets an itch, they can make your life a living hell.
Unfortunately this is true whatever strategy AMSAT takes, and the secretive nature we currently have is NOT protective! The ITAR strategy I laid out would be more protective, since it uses a very clear carve-out to take our work outside of the scope of ITAR.
Thanks
Bruce