Brian Morrison wrote:
On 24 Sep 2010 09:42:02 GMT
Rob wrote:

Brian Morrison wrote:
With D-STAR unless you buy the pre-programmed DSP chips or the DV
dongle you can't legally reimplement the AMBE codec at all, and that
makes it very different from other kit that implements unpatented
modes.

The problem is that amateurs cannot live with the fact that someone
implemented a codec that is better than what they can develop
themselves.

Really? I thought that what those of us that can't live with it thought
is that we don't like technology that locks out homebrew. That's what
the use of DVSI's AMBE codec does.

Not really. You can buy the chip that implements AMBE and use it
as part of a homebrew design.
That is really not much different from buying a power transistor to
get 100 Watts of output from your homebrew transceiver instead of
developing your own, or making your own transmitter tube.
Everyone chooses their own level of components to work from. Some
build the microcontroller for their transceivers from a Z-80, an
EPROM, a CMOS RAM and some LSTTL logic. Others use an integrated
microcontroller with everything on a chip. Still others buy a small
board with a functioning computer system on it and use it as part of
their transceiver.

I don't know exactly why JARL chose AMBE other than because it was the
only codec available at the time. If so, they should have thought about
that a lot harder and perhaps decided to sponsor the development of a
free codec instead. That would have been really good, but I suppose I
can see that it would have introduced a delay. D-STAR has other faults,
one being that it appears not to be extensible so that there is no way
to include other codecs and allow the correct one to be used according
to the other user's set up.

When the chose AMBE there really was no alternative. And even today,
you will not be able to find an open codec that offers speech quality
at the bitrate and bit error resilience that the AMBE codec does.

It is very easy to write "then lets develop that" and apparently much
harder to actually do so.

W.r.t. extensibility, it would sure be nice if codecs could be negotiated
and an alternative could be added, but it would not bring much to
D-STAR as there still would be different worlds of users that cannot
talk to eachother (those with the commercial Icom transceivers that
have AMBE and nothing else, and those with the homebrew transceivers
with open codec and no AMBE).

There would be no problem when amateurs could actually develop a
better codec than AMBE. But they have not shown they can.

Well we'll see won't we? It's taken a while to find people with the
necessary expertise but Codec2 is now moving forward with people
working on it that have that expertise.

Given enough time, it could be that something is developed that is
open and does not violate patents. But I think it will take a lot
of time and there is little chance that at the end of this development
there is still a userbase left that wants to buy and use products
based on it.

Sometimes is it better to just admit that someone did a better job
than you could have done yourself, and just pay him for the work.

I have no problem with that, remember that the "free" part of free
software is referring to freedom, not money. But if someone refuses to
provide something that I can look inside and understand then I won't
use it.

It's called a choice.

That is your choice. But that does not mean that others are wrong.