Post #1551588

2026-01-25 10:30 UTC

You don't have to pay meshtastic any money, so I'm not sure how they're profiting. Remember that no man is an island. There is no way to be completely free of dependence on others and that once you've bought a LoRa device, there's nothing they can do to stop you using it as you see fit.

Replies (1)

@gkaklas@lemmy.zip 2026-01-25 16:28

> You don't have to pay meshtastic any money They can still profit indirectly from providing services etc (which is fine) But even just the fact that in order to use the word "Meshtastic" ™®© I have to read https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/ shows that it does not have "community" vibes but "Meshtastic™®© is ours and we're just letting you use the source code etc for now" vibes Again, the fact that it is owned by *someone* means that the community (probably) does not have control over it, and one day we might need to fork the whole network and migrate every node > there's nothing they can do to stop you using it as you see fit If a specific radio is illegal, it's easy to just find where it's transmitting from and fine you; they already do this with pirate radio stations > There is no way to be completely free of dependence on others But why be dependent on 2 companies instead of having the option to buy a radio from *any* company? Why is competition and diversity bad for an independent and off-grid network that we don't want it to have a single point of failure? 🤔 Not only it can make the network more resilient (which is supposed to be one of the goals), but it allows for experimentation and innovation in new technologies, which you can't do if you're locked into using LoRa™®© Why lock every user into a single technology just because some users want to have a long-lasting battery? (Which btw is probably important for very remote nodes and not the home and portable nodes that I think are more common).

Open ##1551589