Lineage: the 2012 card gets the other half of the story

"FlexRadio closes the source" was only half of what happened in 2012, and
the half that reads as a loss. The card is now "closes the source, and
opens the API", and explains why that matters.

Moving DSP into the radio changed what a console is: no longer a
signal-processing engine, just a control surface over the network — and
FlexRadio documented that surface in full. A versioned command protocol,
VITA-49 streaming, FlexLib as a reference implementation, with slices,
panadapters, meters, profiles, ATU, DAX and remote access all reachable
from outside. That depth is what lets a client written from nothing reach
parity instead of approximating it.

It also answers, in the right place and without defensiveness, the
question the page had been gesturing at: AetherSDR could start from an
empty file because the protocol is published, not because it was avoiding
someone's source.

Trims the footnote to what it needs to say. It had explained the dashed
styling by pointing at the wrong lane — the dashed fork is SmartSDR's, and
AetherSDR has no fork line at all — and re-argued the clean-room point one
card after the card that already makes it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Author: ten9876

assets/js/lineage.js

@@ -70,8 +70,8 @@ const EVENTS = [
   },
   {
     year: '2012', lane: 'flex', era: 'Commercialisation',
-    title: 'FlexRadio closes the source',
-    body: 'The FLEX-6000 series is shown at Dayton with a direct-sampling architecture that moves DSP into the radio. It needs a new client, and SmartSDR is written from scratch as closed source. No code crosses between the two families again.',
+    title: 'FlexRadio closes the source, and opens the API',
+    body: 'The FLEX-6000 series is shown at Dayton with a direct-sampling architecture that moves DSP into the radio. SmartSDR is written from scratch as closed source and no code crosses between the two families again — but the same move opens something up. With the DSP inside the radio, a console is no longer a signal-processing engine; it is a control surface over the network, and FlexRadio documents that surface in full. A versioned command protocol, VITA-49 streaming for spectrum, waterfall and audio, and FlexLib published as a reference implementation. Slices, panadapters, meters, profiles, the ATU, DAX and remote access are all reachable from outside, so a client written from nothing can reach parity rather than approximate it. That depth is why AetherSDR could start from an empty file instead of a fork.',
     people: [['FlexRadio Systems']]
   },
   {

lineage.html

@@ -203,8 +203,8 @@ <h2 class="ev-title">Apache Labs ships the ANAN-10</h2>
             <span class="ev-year">2012</span>
             <span class="ev-branch" style="color:#8B7FF0">SmartSDR (proprietary)</span>
           </div>
-          <h2 class="ev-title">FlexRadio closes the source</h2>
-          <p class="ev-body">The FLEX-6000 series is shown at Dayton with a direct-sampling architecture that moves DSP into the radio. It needs a new client, and SmartSDR is written from scratch as closed source. No code crosses between the two families again.</p>
+          <h2 class="ev-title">FlexRadio closes the source, and opens the API</h2>
+          <p class="ev-body">The FLEX-6000 series is shown at Dayton with a direct-sampling architecture that moves DSP into the radio. SmartSDR is written from scratch as closed source and no code crosses between the two families again — but the same move opens something up. With the DSP inside the radio, a console is no longer a signal-processing engine; it is a control surface over the network, and FlexRadio documents that surface in full. A versioned command protocol, VITA-49 streaming for spectrum, waterfall and audio, and FlexLib published as a reference implementation. Slices, panadapters, meters, profiles, the ATU, DAX and remote access are all reachable from outside, so a client written from nothing can reach parity rather than approximate it. That depth is why AetherSDR could start from an empty file instead of a fork.</p>
           <div class="ev-people"><span class="call">FlexRadio Systems</span></div>
         </li>
         <li class="ev" data-i="8" data-lane="flex" data-year="2013" data-era="Commercialisation">
@@ -356,9 +356,8 @@ <h2 class="ev-title">Where AetherSDR sits</h2>
       </div>
 
       <p class="lin-foot">
-        Lane colours mark independent codebases, not companies. A dashed lane means no shared
-        source — AetherSDR is a clean-room implementation written against FlexRadio's published
-        VITA-49 and SmartSDR APIs, with no PowerSDR, Thetis or OpenHPSDR lineage.
+        Lane colours mark independent codebases, not companies. A dashed fork means no shared
+        source.
       </p>
 
     </div>