[rsync]

"Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years."

... which I don't find surprising and seems to fit, but what I was very surprised by was the tremendous amount of submission, and appeal, to authority that pervades HAM communities.

FCC regulations are not to be questioned. Even to discuss other, possible regulatory regimes or changes to rules is met with incredulity and sometimes outright hostility. God forbid one bring up issues of circumvention, etc.

I find it surprising because it is such a contract to the UNIX/FOSS community which places such a high cultural value on freedom and exploration of the gray areas of systems.

It's an odd cultural aspect of the HAM community ...

[pdabbadabba]

I agree with you that there's absolutely nothing wrong with discussing possible regulatory changes. But it's a different story if what is really going on here is that they want to follow the regs and you want to explore their "gray areas."

In the U.S., the entire HAM community exists at the FCC's pleasure and there are a lot of other interests out there who would be happy to take over their spectrum if the FCC woke up one day and decided it could be more productively used. Poking the FCC in the idea would be a pretty bad move for the community as a whole.