[amsat-bb] AMSAT Open Source Policy

[Bruce Perens]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 7:21 AM Joseph Armbruster <
josepharmbruster at 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