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# System prepended metadata

title: OpenGD77 is Closed

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# OpenGD77 is Closed

Apologies for the pithy title. It's not stricty true, but it frames what happened.

I was a contributor to OpenGD77. Some UI stuff and DCS support, plus some minor fixes. Loads of fun learning how to twiddle embedded devices.

Roger (the maintainer) got pissed off at someone selling GD-77 radios with OpenGD77 pre-installed, because he has a non-commercial note tacked onto the license. He was still pissed when they sold radios with a $10 charge to also install the firmware.

So he stopped sharing the source code.
How that addresses his concern is beyond anyone to explain. They can still download the compiled firmware. There's no reason to believe anyone was compiling it in order to sell it.

I was working for an OSPO at the time (open source programs office) so I had an unreasonable amount of expertise in copyright and licensing.

So I pointed out that distributing the compiled firmware without the corresponding source code violated his own license. That would be fine if he was the only contributor, but "Hi, I'm a contributor too, and it's my source code." I did my best to be polite and clear of course.

His reaction to this was ultimately to strip out and reimplement all of my contributions and take the source code off GitHub.
I've checked and there's still some code I wrote in there, but whatever.

There's a funny bit in there about how the license he used (GPL-3) has legal hacks in it to prevent non-commercial clauses, but he was able to convince all the remaining contributors to let him relicense it all to BSD-3 + non-commercial, which doesn't have those hacks.

None of this was what I wanted. I wanted him to keep sharing the source code. I also wanted to convince him that there's no point having an NC clause, but he wouldn't hear it. There might be some weird complication regarding AU copyright law there.

The workaround to not actually ship the AMBE blob, but have users merge it in when uploading the firmware was my suggestion, based on my experience dealing with copyleft issues.

So in the end, he got what he wanted (an effective non-commercial clause) and I guess I got what I wanted (source code at least for release versions).

What I don't get is the ability to help him improve the firmware. Alas.

Back to the pithy title - the term "open source" means more that "source available". Once of the things it means is that you don't restrict use, including commercial use. OpenGD77 isn't the only project to be unhappy with that ideal. You can say that it's Open as long as source code is provided, but it's not Open Source.