Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Langley, who notes that the KiwiSDR kit is now in stock and shipping again directly from Seed Studio. Click here for the order/product page.
Thanks for the tip, Richard!
The SWLing Post
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Thanks KiwiSDR for your decision to remain 100% Opensource even though it must be frustrating to see other hardware manufacturers not doing their bit and contributing to the software development. The Kiwi and the Kiwi network is a superb monitoring tool – to be able to access HF Rx around the World sometimes in places that were forbidden territory 30 years ago. I have bought 6 Kiwis over the past couple of years and hope this is at least a small contribution and appreciation for the effort of the hadware and software developers.
I have always hoped that there will be a KiwiSDR MK2 with RF and DSP hardware enhancements and designed to fit on more capable Single Board Computers.
73 Terry G0EZY
To answer that question you have to time travel back to 2014 when the BeagleBone Black reigned supreme over the competing Raspberry Pi 1/B+ in terms of performance. There were also many other reasons including FPGA pricing that hasn’t changed one penny since that time (the FPGA capacity was always the major limitation on the number of concurrent users).
In the intervening years all my efforts have gone into improving the software. Redesigning hardware has not yet made sense due to the huge time/distraction required. Although you can now buy an RPi-based thing from China that runs my code you get no change in capabilities. And certainly no support.
The existence of these devices has caused the Kiwi to go closed source. Also these devices are banned from using the value-added services like the listing webpages and reverse proxy on kiwisdr.com
“The existence of these devices has caused the Kiwi to go closed source.”
Really? Didn’t know that, but I don’t like to hear it. Isn’t the whole point of open source that others might use and develop on your stuff? That would have been a large selling point for me as I like to make modifications of my own to things, and the things that let me do so usually go higher on my purchase list. It makes total sense that you wouldn’t offer support or any additional services for that, but it sounds as if you’ve let the people making an alternate hardware platform block all other users from working with the code, even though you presumably realized the benefits of openness earlier. I am unimpressed with that change.
At the moment it’s still 99.9% open. It has to be. That’s the whole point of open source licensing. So your ability to tinker with the majority of the code is intact. And that will not change.
But I’m also fully able to choose to close any future developments that are not license-related to the current code. That allows me to give some incentive for people to keep buying my stuff rather than sending their money to the competition. After all, they share no part of their profits with me for using my code. As opposed to how I share part of the Kiwi profits with the open source contributors on which the Kiwi code is based.
I understand that it is in your rights to close your future developments, but I’d like to try once more to convince you not to do that. You seem to have realized the benefits of open source when you initially made your first releases open, and those benefits still hold. One minor benefit and drawback is that others are going to use your code without paying you for the privilege. It is a drawback for all the reasons you’ve identified, but it’s a benefit to your customers because it means the project can continue even if you leave and they can work to add features that you don’t want to. This in turn can really help your business, because if I want to purchase one of these, I’m going to choose the one that benefits the author and not the one from a company I’ve never heard of with dubious prospects for support. If I’m not confident about openness when I choose to purchase, I might just not bother to buy one at all. By keeping things open, even with competition, you’re likely earning yourself customers who have a mindset similar to mine.
Laurence, you know what? That’s a very persuasive argument. And you’ve changed my mind. I’m going to flip-flop and stay 100% open source. Competition be damned.
The truth is I didn’t really like the amount of time I was spending figuring out how to close things up. It’s a pain and not productive. Especially when there are so many improvements in the queue I’d like to make.
So thank you for taking the time to express your opinion. I, and I’m sure others, appreciate it.
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So thank you for taking the time to express your opinion. I, and I’m sure others, appreciate it.
@KiwiSdr
Be sure that others apperciate it !!
I like the kiwi, but I wonder why they apparently never considered other option for the computing board; that alone may give a published SDR support for more cuncurrent users