Note that the author of this piece, Bruce Perens, is the founder of the open source initiative with Eric Raymond.
Sadly none of this stuff with the ARRL is new. One ham activity is contests where hams compete to talk to as many people as they can in a weekend or over multiple weekends. There are clubs consisting of multiple members who compete for the prize of top club. In the early seventies they changed the rules so that you could be a member if you lived within 175 miles of the clubs location.
I helped formed a Midwest club, the Mad River Radio Club that was based in Ohio but had members in four states. We entered and won the competition. Then after the event was finished the ARRL rewrote the rules posthumously and all of a sudden we'd been disqualified.
Interesting. They used to sell the whole archive of QST and QEX on CD, but I don't see that anymore, just individual years.
Failure to make their back issues available online seems like a genuine breach of faith with their authors over the years. I can only assume that if someone does upload them to archive.org, they'll send a DMCA takedown notice in a hurry.
Sadly none of this stuff with the ARRL is new. One ham activity is contests where hams compete to talk to as many people as they can in a weekend or over multiple weekends. There are clubs consisting of multiple members who compete for the prize of top club. In the early seventies they changed the rules so that you could be a member if you lived within 175 miles of the clubs location.
I helped formed a Midwest club, the Mad River Radio Club that was based in Ohio but had members in four states. We entered and won the competition. Then after the event was finished the ARRL rewrote the rules posthumously and all of a sudden we'd been disqualified.