I completely agree with your remarks.
For people who are interested in opensource and amateurradio, I propose you have a look at the conferences on that topic.
Overhere in Europe, there are two of them
- FOSDEM ("Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting") is a yearly event held in Brussels every 1st weekend of February. In the 2024 edition, there was a devroom ("developers room") on SDR and Amateur-radio. https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/radio/
The videos of the talks are online. I propose to have a look at the talks on M17 and on OpenRTX.(*) Also open source hardware is becoming more interesting.
- Next september, we will be hosting "spectrum24", a new conference on "novel ways to use the spectrum we -as citizens- are able to use. It puts a lot of emphesis on Open-source as yes, most -if not all- of the new projects coming out in amateur-radio are open source.
For this conference, we are at the "cfp" (Call for Presentations) stage. See here: https://spectrum-conference.org/24/cfp
I know that Europe is the opposite side of the globe for you in Autralia. Perhaps there are similar events on your side of the world.
Kristoff (ON1ARF)