Is the ARRL trying to destroy Amateur Radio?
Bill Walker, W5GFE (chair of the CS department at East Central
University in Oklahoma) recently wrote a nice set of Tcl/Tk-based
tools for processing input/output from NEC, a moment-method based
program for predicting antenna patterns.
Bill submitted an article describing his software to QST. (Bill runs
FreeSCO at home but gently suggested to readers that that any flavour
of FreeUNIX was worth trying, for all the obvious reasons.)
However, the editor informed him that about 85 percent of the
readership of QST is heavily involved with some form of MS Windows and
that articles concerning Linux/UNIX software would therefore *not* be
appropriate.
The editor of QST suggested that Bill approach the editor of the ARRL
antenna compendium. The editor of the compendium was willing to
accept the article but only on the condition that the software not be
released to the public domain. (The ARRL apparently wanted exclusive
distribution rights to the software in order to make it worth their
while to include it in one of their pblications.)
At that point, Bill and the ARRL parted company and Bill posted his
software and the article to the unofficial NEC website,
http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu/
Anyway, simply a story that had to be passed on....
-- Dave Michelson davem@ee.ubc.ca