D-Star Vs Open Source

I hear this argument come up, time and time again, "Why does D-Star use the AMBE VOCODER when there are other opesn source alternatives available?". So why did they - well there are potentially a number of reasons, D-Star is probably older than you might realise; It was developed in the 1990s, a time when open source software was still very much a "new" thing, the software itself was in its infancy and super low bit rate codecs were few and far between. Add to that the fact that the CPU's available to build the radios with would have been very much less powerfull, and suddenly you can see exactly why the AMBE Vocoder was chosen. Why are there people who are worked up about this - because, they think for some reason that this AMBE Vocoder is the whole reason that D-Star has not been adopted by other manufacturers - but that isnt the case either, D-Star (the name) is a trademark owned by Icom, sure, but the protocol, the inner workings etc. were developed by the JARL (Japan Amateur Radio League) and not Icom. Maybe those same people who are worked up about the use of the AMBE Vocoder are annoyed because that means they cannot build their own D-Star radio, again this is nonsense, if you really want to build a high quality VHF radio, without using a single off the shelf part, and without buying anything - I'd be supprised and it will be a huge undertaking. Fact is you will have to buy some of the bits, so just add the Vocoder to your list. AMBE also offer a software version of the vocoder (as Icom uses in their current generation of radios), thats right - if you are that alergic to the chip, you could use the software version. Finally - the Open Source community; there are some shaky implementations of the AMBE Vocoder complient codecs, they are having to be clean room reverse engineered, sure they are not perfect but maybe in time.