What kind of projects? I've been looking at moving that direction but most of the fun SDR work is classified stuff and the commercial world seems pretty happy with ancient superhet architectures for the most part.

Position, navigation, and time from “signals of opportunity” (I.e., existing radio signals that aren’t GPS)

A-PNT type stuff? Can I ask what the commercial application is?

PNT in GPS-denied areas, and office campus wide time sync.

Very cool, thanks for indulging my curiosity

The problem always comes down to lack of responsible use. Great, you learned a lot. Others are using it for harm. So now we have a problem.

Look at the state of CB radio. Anybody can buy and use one. The airwaves are clogged with the trucker equivalent of YouTube Poop. It's like being in a fucking mental hospital.

Ham radio requires licensing. There are still cranks but now there's a barrier to entry for most of them. It's still usable.

Lockpicks are illegal to carry in parts of America, unless you're a licensed locksmith.

Look at the state of the internet, 1997 vs now. The difference is we onboarded everybody.

Broadly speaking, trolling/crime (and tools to perpetrate it) should not be frictionless. Attacks on infrastructure (malware, etc.) are getting too expensive and social attacks are basically free to execute and costly to respond to.

You can bring any western company to a grinding halt by getting a bunch of entry-level stooges to file false workplace violence and other complaints indiscriminately in bad faith. There's no cost or consequence for this, and the company will panic trying to accommodate in good faith, but do the same with police reports and everyone gets charged with misdemeanors for abusing the system.

Unearned privileges are always abused.