Re: [TenTec] open source

["Ten-Tec Inc. Amateur Radio Sales" <sales@tentec.com>]

At 04:12 PM 9/23/04 -0700, you wrote:
>  I think TT has a moral
> obligation to either make it all happen or let someone else have a crack at
> it.  There's no shame in this -- TT has not failed, rather they have led the
> way. They fail only if they disappoint -- and I for one would be very
> disappointed if they made a radio, wouldn't fix it and allowed no-one else
> to fix it either.  Hopefully they're much smarter than to let that happen.

What is not understood about this discussion is that the DSP code takes
a serious engineering effort to create and cannot be simply given away
for anyone (including companies that compete with us) to use.  We have
lots of competition both in the amateur radio and non-amateur radio
arenas; to simply give away our intellectual property would let others
use our engineering effort to their advantage.  Perhaps years from now,
when current equipment is discontinued the possibility of making it
available for use and experimentation could be discussed - but in the
short term, there is no possibility of this happening.

Leaving aside the entire discussion of what a project it would be to try
to provide tech support for people troubleshooting their own version of
our code to make their radio do something specific and/or modify the
existing radio.

We do custom engineering work all the time.  There are customized
versions of DSP radios that we sell as off-the-shelf items out in circulation
right now - and there was a significant cost incurred for engineering time
to create these items.   The eventual owners of these custom radios
paid a hefty price to use our engineering time to modify our intellectual
property to get exactly what they wanted.

Slightly different topic:
I've been following the discussion about the recent lack of Jupiter updates
with a bit of trepidation.

We've taken a lot of heat over "look how many firmware updates
there have been for this rig..." and the converse is "After three years,
there haven't been recent updates coming for this rig..." - that's hard to
win either way.  Yes, updates for the Orion will continue until some
future date.  No, we haven't done any updates for the Jupiter since
fall of '03 after three years of issuing them.  That doesn't mean we
won't do them in future, however.

Scott Robbins W4PA
Amateur Radio Product Manager, Ten-Tec, Inc.


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