On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:26 AM, [email protected] wrote:
**
Tom makes the point that Gnu Radio isn’t “shiny”. Indeed, it isn’t.
“Everything’s shiny, Cap’n. Not to fret”
That was just a little something for the Firefly fans in the audience.
Good perspectives, everyone, thanks!
Some people arrive at Gnu Radio expecting that it is an “end
application”,
The problem is that the field of “radio” is incredibly diverse, so much so
that from my perspective I can’t imagine a single class of application that
would be “the one that everyone is looking for”. Sure, there has been an
emphasis on SDR in academic environments for use in commercial
networking/telecoms applications, but really, that’s rather the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to potential applications for SDR (and by
implication, Gnu Radio).
I agree, definitely. I think that there’s so much interesting
capabilities
out there for SDR that we’re only just getting in to now. I’m often
asked
about doing standards in GNU Radio, but to me, that’s really
uninteresting.
It has it’s role, sure, but once you have a standard defined, you can
build
a chip to handle it. GNU Radio is much to general, flexible, and dynamic
for a standard. We want to see new ideas and classes of applications
enabled because of this technology. I really don’t want to go chasing
the
standards train because by definition, we’re always going to be lagging.
Clark P. observed that building end-user applications is a lot of
work. I completely agree. End-user applications have to be polished,
reliable, easy-to-use, and fully documented. Even something as relatively
simple as SIDSuite, which is up on CGRAN, requires a lot of work to make
it “friendly” to an “appliance” user. I just can’t see our core developer
team spending their time in that part of the space. But if their job is
done correctly, the applications will (and have!) emerge.
No, we’re not interested in that level of involvement, and I understand
why
there is varying levels of friendliness and/or bitrot occurring in some
of
the CGRAN projects when you don’t have someone who’s motivated in
keeping
it up to date. Many of the projects out there were student projects and
those students then went and got jobs that are paying them to do other
things. And I’m incredibly grateful to those people who took the time to
publish there work at all, lest anyone think that I’m critical of the
contributions made!
On the other hand, there are definite rewards that come from open source
development, many of which are monetary. There are an increasing number
of
jobs out there that are requesting GNU Radio experience. When you can
point
to your published code for your resume, that could be pretty convincing.
I won’t get into all of the ways that open source works as a model, even
for complex programs. I’ll just point to Linux, GCC, Apache, and Python.
There are a variety of reasons people contribute to those projects,
sames
as GNU Radio.
Much application development for Gnu Radio is going on in the
background,
on private projects that will never be published. So it’s easy for people
to get the impression that Gnu Radio has no apps. That’s just plain not
true.
And that’s a really good point. There’s lots of work that’s been done
out
there. My specific issue was that there’s not necessarily a lot
“out-of-the-box” that people can point to and get working. A lot of the
high-quality apps that exist are not distributed (and as far as I’ve
seen,
no one is breaking the GPL with what they are doing), so that model
doesn’t
help with the general outside perception that I was discussing in my
post.
Tom
This is functionality that pushes the frame