"When An App Outlives Its Creator"

The following edited article by Peter Vogel appeared in The B.C. Catholic, a publication of the Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada.  For me, this article was timely and poignant and exactly summed up my feelings.  

While I greatly appreciate the hard work now underway by several teams in creating a "competing" HamClock-like resources, I especially appreciate the efforts of the team working to keep the vision of HamClock alive as it was originally envisioned by Elwood Downey, WB0OEW (SK).

OpenClaw, Clawdbots, Moltbots, Moltbooks, Claude Code, GPT 5.3, Grok Imagine, Opus 4.6, agentic AI, AGI, ASI … so much for tech terms in the news as I write this column.

Do you ever get the feeling that you can’t keep up with the breakneck speed of technological evolution? “Evolution” doesn’t even seem an appropriate word for the circumstances.

In recent days, one of my niche areas of interest, amateur radio, lost an innovator, Elwood Downey, who created and operated a widely used application called HamClock. Although it had started life as just that, a clock display with various time formats radio people use, it had morphed over time into a very sophisticated interface giving tremendous detail about radio signal propagation and space weather metrics.

Those in the amateur radio field learned of his passing through a note he left on his website and through an auto-response email. Not only did it announce his passing, but it noted his HamClock service would cease to run in June of this year.

Now you might think programs don’t just cease to work spontaneously. Well, in this case, HamClock was heavily dependent on what we call a server backend, with associated internet domain names. It will indeed cease to function.

Cease to function because domain names expire, servers require electricity to operate, and telecommunications utilities have fees for their operation. You get the idea. Someone was paying bills behind the scenes to keep the HamClock service operational, with most end users completely unaware of the magnanimity involved.

In the days following his passing, two teams, and later others, set to work almost immediately to see if they could duplicate the legacy of Mr. Downey’s HamClock. As I write this column, not yet a week later, both have managed to achieve working versions, one team almost duplicating the original, the other taking a from-the-ground-up approach and making use of modern web-interface coding constructs not available when HamClock originally took to screens across the world.

This new work to ensure HamClock lives on, either directly as it is today or in some modified form, raises interesting questions about content we access over the internet from a privately owned resource site. What should happen to such a site when its owner passes away? Are there legal issues that arise? Is the look and feel of an internet resource subject to a form of copyright, for instance?

In the case of HamClock, we have a partial answer. The actual part of HamClock, which users interact with directly, installed locally on either a Raspberry Pi computer or on a Windows laptop through the Linux subsystem, carries an MIT license. Essentially, this means the look and feel can be copied without legal issue.

As for the backend, the server content behind the scenes, there it becomes a little more complicated, perhaps even a lot more complicated. The physical server has an owner or owners. At this stage, whether such ownership can be transferred or whether the estate even provides for such an ownership change is not known.

This needn’t be an obstacle, though, as the server’s real work was pulling in complex data from other sources, many owned by departments of the United States government (for example, the Space Weather Prediction Centre, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS)). 

Other data in HamClock was pulled from privately owned sites operated by others in the amateur radio field, and any use going forward would require agreements with those site owners. Again, not an obstacle in principle.

However, as the web-based solution team is discovering, processing some of this data and getting it to thousands of HamClock installations around the world is not a straightforward task, especially if it is to be accomplished with near-instant delivery. So far, as of this writing, this is an obstacle.

What is becoming apparent to end users is that HamClock’s creator was fully funding the backend operation, running dedicated servers and absorbing the incurred costs totally on his own, much in the spirit of how amateur radio has run for around a hundred years.

If HamClock, as I know it, disappears, I shall greatly miss it. It is a testament to someone who not only had a vision but who had a talent for bringing it to fruition in an elegant way.

Whether or not HamClock has any meaning to you is really immaterial to this story. What it does is remind us that “free” products and services have a cost and, in some cases, a very human aspect to them.

Ideally, HamClock lives on, indistinguishable from how it is today. That will indeed be a tribute to Elwood Downey, callsign WB0OEW.

Follow Peter on Twitter/X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).  Email: pvogel@outlook.com.

(I believe Peter's callsign may be VE7AFV per the listing on QRZ.  Apologies to Peter and VE7AFV if I've got that wrong!)