The Open Source Experience

I am currently working on repurposing a 10 year old smartphone to supply music to one of my transmitters (for internal use only).

To do this, I have been working with open source software, both for recovery and flashing a custom ROM (Android 13).  It's been challenging to say the least.

I've worked on a number of projects recently involving open source software.  First, don't get me wrong.  I appreciate it that people are willing to work on it, and, this is the most important, distribute it openly and for free.

I've also found that simple applications, requiring little to no interaction with any other parts of your system, and written natively for Windows, tend to install easily and work well.

It's all others that I have had issues with.  Quite frankly, it's user beware.  Oh, if you can get the software installed and up and running, it will likely work after a fashion.  But the lack of documentation, and lack of rigorous testing, make the installation and the actual using of this software a real challenge.  And that's coming from someone who has worked in the field of both large and small scale software development, and project management, for most of his working  life.  I've developed with both low level and high level programming languages, using all paradigms that have been invented, and developed and supported operating systems, compilers, AI systems and plain old applications.  So I know what I'm doing.

It's one of the reasons I've avoided using Linux.  I want at least some stability on any platform I'm developing on, and Linux just doesn't cut it.  You can get it to work if you try long enough, and it does make you look and sound cool when you start talking and typing obscure commands.  But getting things to actually work takes a lot more effort, effort I'd rather put elsewhere.

A good case in point about open source software is the SDR server I recently got up and running.  The documentation was sketchy, misleading, and in some cases just plain wrong.  The software was developed for Linux, but advertised as running on Windows using Docker.

Well, it was obvious that this latter fact had never really been tested. The software didn't work unless you added various undocumented other pieces (such as accessing the SDR hardware from the emulator environment).  Quite frankly, it was a mess. So much so that I posted an installation guide here, which probably needs updating (as in the meantime I found other non working features and had to correct them).

Well, back to my smartphone endeavor.  The first step was to flash a custom recovery program to the phone, and the documentation was 2 (!) lines.  Easy peasy you might say.  Well, 2 days later, and missing a lot of hair, I finally got the recovery flashed, only to find it doesn't work.  I'm now in the process of debugging that.  Along the way, while digging deeper, I ran into missing drivers, the wrong drivers, no documentation of course, and even incorrect documentation.  Well, at least I've gotten this far, and I will get further.  I'm nothing if not stubborn.