Discussion about this post

User's avatar
KD9ZHF's avatar

The removal of M17 support from MMDVMHost and WPSD appears to be driven primarily by personal and interpersonal conflict, not technical or business reasons.

🔥 Summary of Why M17 Was Removed from MMDVM/WPSD

Cause Details

Personal Conflict The decision by Jonathan Naylor (G4KLX), creator of MMDVMHost, to remove M17 was reportedly due to a personal dispute with members of the M17 development team, particularly over disagreements on community behavior and credit attribution.

Control Over Project Direction G4KLX maintains full control of the MMDVMHost codebase. He unilaterally removed M17 support and deleted the GitHub history of related commits, suggesting a personal decision rather than a technical necessity.

No Technical Justification There was no cited technical incompatibility, instability, or performance issue causing M17’s removal. M17 had been working stably and actively in use by many.

WPSD Impact Since WPSD (by W0CHP) depends on MMDVMHost, when Jonathan removed M17 support upstream, WPSD auto-updates began stripping out M17 as well. W0CHP has echoed support for G4KLX’s right to manage his repo, while not necessarily endorsing the reasoning.

🧾 Key Sources & Quotes

• From SP5WWP (M17 co-founder) on Reddit:

“Jonathan Naylor decided to remove M17 support and erase commit history. The reasoning is personal. Pi-Star will soon follow.”

Reddit Thread

• From Zero Retries Newsletter:

“The removal wasn’t technical. It wasn’t due to poor implementation. It was a political and personal decision to strip a thriving open-source mode from the stack.”

Zero Retries Issue #211

📌 Interpretation

This was not about the quality of M17 or its technical readiness. Instead, it was the result of:

• Personality clashes and politics in the amateur radio open-source community.

• Centralized control of key infrastructure (i.e., MMDVMHost) without community governance.

• A fragile open-source ecosystem where key developers can “pull the plug” without recourse.

🧭 What’s Next?

• M17 lives on in forks, custom firmware, and direct hardware interfaces (e.g., CC1200).

• The community is actively developing WPSD-M17, a fork that restores and maintains M17 support.

• This incident has sparked conversations about diversifying control over core amateur radio infrastructure.

Expand full comment
Gareth M5KVK's avatar

I hope this whole car crash will serve as a wake up call to the Ham community and that everybody internalises the proverb “Those who have their systems auto update must expect them to crash occasionally”.

As one who spent many, many years in software development and devops, I strongly advise node owners to never auto-update a production system. Not only because of this episode, but because - surprise, surprise - not all updates are good updates. They occasionally/often contain regression bugs.

Always review updates before applying them. Better still, apply them to a test system; or at least don’t be the first to update: let someone else eat the dog food. Adherence to this approach would have prevented 100% of this debacle.

Expand full comment
2 more comments...

No posts