Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] "GNU Radio is crap" and GSoc

[Martin Braun]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 04:13:30PM -0500, Tom Rondeau wrote:
> "Everything's shiny, Cap'n. Not to fret"
> 
> That was just a little something for the Firefly fans in the audience.

You've just received +10 geek cred plus a personal "favourite OSS
project leader of the month" award from myself :)

Since I *actually* started this thread (sheesh, I'm such a buzzkill
somethimes) to motivate people to have a look at the GSoC page, I'd
like to throw out a couple of points:

- An 'application' does not have to be a perfect, end-user friendly
  product. It can be anything as simple as a grc file that lives in
  gnuradio-examples. If it just outputs stuff on the command line that's
  OK for me (if it does something cool).
- Also, there's no obligation to maintain an application until the end
  of days. If there's a cool demo available, adding some 'evidence' to
  the project page (and this could simply be a page on CGRAN), such as
  pictures, or perhaps a Youtube video, is already enough to make GNU Radio
  look better as a backend.

So, don't be discouraged!

MB




> 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.

-- 
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Communications Engineering Lab (CEL)

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Braun
Research Associate

Kaiserstraße 12
Building 05.01
76131 Karlsruhe

Phone: +49 721 608-43790
Fax: +49 721 608-46071
www.cel.kit.edu

KIT -- University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and
National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association

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