[aprssig] APRS roadmap planning proposal

[Scott Howard]

John, thank you for your comments

On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 3:59 PM John Langner WB2OSZ <wb2osz at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Anyone who has tried to implement the protocol has found it difficult
> because two decades of updates are scattered around rather than being
> merged into the original protocol specification.
>
> I'm already pretty far along on updating the protocol specification with
> the later notes.

Oh great! If that's something you think could be a starting point,
maybe we can use that.

> The problem with putting it on github or otherwise making it publicly
> available
> Is that the original document is copyright 2000 by the APRS Working Group.
>
> If the original "APRS Working Group" is no longer interested in maintaining
> the document, the new maintainers would need to obtain permission to
> distribute a modified copy of the copyrighted material.

This is a real issue I was worried about too. Without a license to
modify and redistribute, and/or without the "source code" of the
original document, any new effort will be required to essentially
start from scratch. That's why I was putting such an emphasis on open
source licenses in whatever comes next (and to use something like
LaTeX that lends well to long term maintenance of protocol documents
and comes with helpful packages like https://ctan.org/pkg/bytefield).

If we can't get a license to the original document, we might have to
skip to #2 on the roadmap.