The Refined Ham: Free software and shady business practices

The ARRL recently announced a new digital-mode contest. I’ve never contested before and this one seems to be right up my alley. These days, I work mostly FT8 but I would definitely like to expand into other modes, such as PSK31 and FT4. (RTTY is the only digital method not allowed since it will retain its own contest in January).

I decided to take a few moments and research some of the other amateur radio software that is available out of sheer curiosity. Among the many choices I found while casually Googling on a Wednesday evening was a commercial product called Ham Radio Deluxe. I am not linking to their site for reasons that will be very obvious shortly.

Ham Radio Deluxe, or HRD for short, was developed by Simon Brown GK4ELI (HB9DRV) and Peter PH1PH (sk) under a freeware license. The last version that they released as freeware was version 5.0.2893. The license that was in effect at the time is documented quite clearly in the software.

Once Simon ceased development he sold the code to Mike Carper, WA9PIE, Randy Gawtry, K0CBH and Rick Ruhl, W4PC. These three would go on to develop a few bug fixes in the 5.x application branch before eventually releasing version 6, a commercial product that costs $99, is closed-source, and, as you’ll soon see dear reader, buggy as all hell. People started complaining that the product that had been free was now closed-source, commercialized, and did not work properly.

Bad reviews started popping up on eHam and other sites. The cantankerous, grumpy, and often acerbic administrator of QRZ, AA7BQ, joined the fray after a forum thread discussing issues with HRD popped up. AA7BQ, never one to ignore a fight, inflamed the discussion by locking and deleting threads critical of HRD, claiming to be unbiased. AA7BQ later doubled-down by threatening another ham and attacking him via email after deleting another QRZ forum post critical of HRD.

But, we’re just getting started here.

When the original author of the bad review, N2SUB, opened a support ticket for issues relating to HRD version 6 the support person, Tim, attacked him, blacklisted his call sign from the software, and essentially told him to get lost.

If this was a one-shot deal it may not have ended as badly as it did. But, the developers of HRD continued to blacklist people who were critical of the poor quality of the software. Instead of fixing bugs and taking positive action to rectify some pretty obvious deficiencies, the developers decided to “take the money and run”, essentially cutting off scores of people who posted things that the HRD developers did not like.

Threats of lawsuits flew from HRD towards anyone who dared to post a negative review. N2SUB was threatened to be sued for releasing the support ticket text. A Twitter user, @textfiles, was threatened with a libel lawsuit for an innocuous Tweet referring to N2SUB’s blacklisting.

Not content to piss off their paid customers, HRD started going after anyone hosting the last version of the freeware HRD software.

Oh, and if you couldn’t contact the license server at the time of running, HRD would make a nice little registry key calling you a TH1EF. Because if their licensing server is down, the end-user has obviously stolen the software. Impeccable logic.

I could go on and on about the incredibly inane things and half-baked apologies HRD’s developers issued, retracted, re-issued, re-retracted, and so on but this mega thread over at reddit sums up the entire saga very well.

If you are looking for the latest free version of HRD, 5.0.2893, you can certainly hit your favorite search engine for it. It’s not difficult to find just yet but I can only imagine that the asshats who develop, own, and continue to run HRD into the ground will be happy to send every last host a cease and desist letter based on dubious claims and unsupportable legal arguments.

I know for a fact that they will never get a dime from me.