What would you rather have?
a. A lively public rant from Linus?
b. Your kernel disabled without warning?
Seriously, is there no open source equivalent? Not my field, but I understand Hams are not quite the same as CB freaks.
Not all of them are seriously techie, but many are, and I'm sure that if one of their number produced something decent and GPL'd it (other licences available) fellow Hams would soon find issues and work with the developers or get about fixing them if the original author(s) for any reason weren't able to.