Hi Stuart and welcome! Thanks for reporting your thoughts here. Sorry for my delayed response, it took me a while to reply because I was away and busy for the Google Mentor Summit.
I think your thoughts resonate with many of us here and are surely received with appreciation. I will surely help you out in integrating OpenWISP in your project. OpenMesh was a great project, it's sad to know this is happening. You need to keep in mind OpenMesh evolved in many years of development, iterations and was a well funded business. OpenWISP as a project has been around for a while now, but the new version you can see has been around only for about 2 years now, which is clearly not enough to build the same feature set and easy setup that commercial providers can offer, moreover, the OpenWISP Open Source project is not a company and doesn't aim at becoming one. There are different companies using OpenWISP and helping to fund its development from time to time and I think that is a good thing, because we avoid risking to centralize too much power in a single company which could be bought up by another company and change its policies in ways that go against the founding values of this project <http://openwisp.io/docs/general/values.html>. Making OpenWISP easy to use for everyone is one of our end goals <http://openwisp.io/docs/general/values.html#goals> but before getting there there's a some essential work to do to complete some of the missing modules (radius, monitoring and firmware upgrade). The radius module is almost done, I'd say we are just some weeks away from the first release. With monitoring and firmware upgrade we will need more time. Once the base modules are completed we'll be able to focus our resources in improving UX, cohesion and integration of modules with one another, documentation, better automation, new advanced features. This type of work is not something that can be sped up only with money (although some more funding would surely help), remember: Rome wasn't built in a day. The best path is organic growth: attracting more contributors who care about this project, write more documentation, removing obstacles for contributors so they can get up to speed faster, promoting openwisp at conferences and meetups, encourage users to submit feedback, open issues, propose features. So having companies which use openwisp contribute to fund some of these activities would be great, as long as these companies don't attempt at taking control of the community or the roadmap. I wouldn't say Google has gotten involved. Google runs some mentorship programs to support Open Source Software Communities and we are participating in two of these programs: Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In. Their involvement has been to simply accept us into these programs. These programs have helped us to establish a process to onboard new contributors and has helped us to grow in numbers. To sum up, we have a feedback loop to improve the project, the community is growing, the development is moving forward. We need to maintain this rhythm and keep improving our process. What can you (or anyone like Stuart who shares his views) do to help? - use OpenWISP and send feedback aimed at improving it - fund the development of specific things you need - file bug reports - help us to make it easier for new contributors to get started in sending patches - help us to improve the documentation More information on how to help the project grow is available in the documentation <http://openwisp.io/docs/general/help-us.html>. Let's keep in touch here or in the general chat <https://gitter.im/openwisp/general> :-) Best luck with your project! Federico On Tuesday, October 9, 2018 at 6:58:42 AM UTC+2, Stuart Trusty wrote: > > Greetings All, > > I am very pleased to see the progress of OpenWISP, and I think it is time > for part of this group to branch into a production deliverable rather than > a do-it-yourself or development environment. Having worked in these WIFI > commercial portals (i.e. Cloudtrax, WifiGator, etc.) and having sold into > the market for commercial WIFI, I am acutely aware of what is needed to > meet this market with a viable and easily usable product. > > Some of you may be aware of the features of CloudTrax (from Datto, who > acquired Open-Mesh), and despite the deprecated technology, it formed the > basis of a nice easily-deployed-by-everyman kind of mesh WIFI environment > that supported a paid captive portal. I received an email from Datto last > week saying that they are abandoning every last vestige of OpenMesh' > Open/GPL roots, and closing down their Cloudtrax service for new users > except if you pay them every month to use their radios. Due to this kind > of mentality, the developing world and non-profit sector is effectively > closed out of the cheap and very-easy-to-use WIFI market which I find very > unfortunate due to the simplicity of deploying a mesh network using their > management portal. > > So, we are all in the market for a replacement for Cloudtrax that works > nicely with 802.11s and OpenWRT. We will need to standardize support of > radios that work good in different localities and are low cost- part of the > issue deploying of deploying OpenMesh is even at USD79, in a country like > India the duty is 44% plus shipping, but you can get a very nice India-made > TP-Link modem here for about USD15 to 19. Same goes for using Ubiquiti as > a solution there. > > What we have at OpenWISP is everything that CloudTrax portal does, but by > hand. Yes there are radio maps that interface with Google. Yes there is a > mesh diagram between radios. Yes, there are templates that configure > radios. Yes, they do this by MAC address. There are branches of code and > subprojects going all different directions in all different languages, > which is great, and it is also great that Google has gotten involved- I am > sure they are benefiting from these developments in their own mesh 802.11s > WIFI product Google WIFI. > > However, it is time to turn this project into something that benefits > everyone everywhere. For users migrating from OpenMesh (whose radios work > great on OpenWRT), the goal is that there is only ONE more step involved in > making the deployment, and that is the flashing of the firmware- something > also made easy in CloudTrax. To make it publicly usable, the new system > literally needs to be able to be setup and maintained by 10 year olds. > > I was in the middle of coding a crypto-payment gateway for WIFI captive > portal, which was being developed under OpenMesh, but now we are forcibly > needing to migrate to OpenWRT, CoovaChilli and OpenWISP. But coding this > next-generation portal will be good for everyone, and I would like to see > if this message resonates with anyone, and if anyone else is interested in > going this development track with us. We are prepared to fund some of the > development, but the fact is that the OpenWISP infrastructure is basically > done already, it just needs to be knit together from the standpoint of a > non-so-bright end user wanting to put WIFI in his trailer park. That is > really where we are at. > > I am not opposed to going through another ICO to fund a whizbang > development here, but I don't think it needs to be done this way, I think > just a very few of us can kick this out very quickly once the priorities > and functionality are turned into the design spec moving forward. > > Thank you for your consideration, > Stuart > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenWISP" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
