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I'm not sure that it's disdain. I think it might just be more that it's a niche that matured in a different era, and the solutions are "good enough" to not warrant the recreation of these tools from scratch.

The amateur radio community isn't enormous, and the overlap between operator and developer doesn't always exist.

Because you are able to build and modify radios as a ham, many do and charge for said hardware. This just spilled over into software where people feel they should be paid for the work they’ve done just like the hardware folks. And since a lot of that started before OSS was popular it’s strangely stuck around.

That said some of the most popular ham software (like WSJT-X) are open source. I think the trend is starting to shift the other direction.

There is a lot of open source ham radio software. Enough that Debian has a team working on packaging it all. Some links:

https://lwn.net/Articles/868309/ https://www.debian.org/blends/hamradio/