 Mitola's publication of software radio in the IEEE opened the concept to the broad community of radio engineers.His May 1995 special issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine with the cover "Software Radio" was regarded as watershed event with thousands of academic citations.Mitola was introduced by Joao da Silva in 1997 at the First International Conference on Software Radio as "godfather" of software radio in no small part for his willingness to share such a valuable technology "in the public interest."