You own your radio. The protocols you use — AX.25 and APRS — are open standards anyone can implement. But the software your club depends on? That's often a different story.

For the security-minded: this is a story about critical communication infrastructure running on software whose source code doesn't exist.

Amateur radio has a long tradition of self-reliance: building your own antennas, maintaining your own gear, understanding your own stack. That tradition breaks down at the software layer. Too much of the tooling that holds the hobby together is maintained by a single developer, distributed as a closed binary, with no source code and no succession plan. We've already seen what happens when that developer is gone: When Roger Barker G4IDE passed in 2004, UI-View32's source code went with him — leaving the community to maintain unofficial workarounds rather than fix the underlying binary, with the registration servers eventually going dark. Bob Bruninga WB4APR's death in 2022 raised the same question for his reference APRS implementations and the aprs.org site he maintained. These aren't edge cases — they're a pattern, and the hobby's aging demographics make it one we can't ignore.

This talk makes the case that open-source licensing isn't just a software philosophy — it's an infrastructure resilience strategy. If a tool is critical to your club's operations or your emergency net, its source code needs to outlive its author.

As a working example, we'll look at open-packet: an early-stage, MIT-licensed packet messaging client in Python — a working existence proof that the open-source path is viable. A brief live demo will show the basic functionality, along with some nice to have extras such as visual themes and a web client.

Attendees will leave with a concrete lens for evaluating the software they depend on, a GitHub link, and three specific asks — from "try it" to "apply this thinking to every tool in your shack."