> Quite interesting is the bit about hiring the "former lead of GNU Radio" who had experienced pain in getting closed/proprietary hardware things to be useful. I wonder if this will lead to more open platforms. If for no other reason, that bit makes the article worth reading.

This makes me more worried, not less.

The reason why you couldn't repurpose those things targeted at "specific technologies" is that they were engineered for purpose.

You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem. You don't wan't a wideband ADC--you want low power for battery usage so you want to narrow the bandwidth as much as possible. You are willing to give up generality in order to get a couple more dB in order to increase your range by another couple miles, etc.

The problem is that it is so expensive to do your own chip that everybody tries to shoehorn their solution into something that exists in volume but really isn't quite right simply to avoid that expense.

If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround.