Hey Stuart,

On Saturday, November 10, 2018 at 2:00:39 PM UTC+1, Stuart Trusty wrote:
>
> Hi Federico,  
>
> You might be misunderstanding my tone, as I am certainly not complaining. 
>

Then you need to tone down your emails and focus on technical issues 
instead of bringing up political / commercial issues which are not the 
focus of this project nor I believe anyone on this mailing list cares (not 
everybody who uses openwisp uses it to build a public wifi service and I 
believe many have never used OpenMesh and some even don't know what we are 
talking about, many use it as a tool to automate their networks).
 

> I have had my nose in the GPL since 1994, and was one of the earliest 
> supporters of Open-Mesh when it was a free and open project very similar 
> in purpose and values to this one.  I intensely accept the terms of the 
> GPL, and what your are doing here is a welcome relief from the tyranny of 
> Datto Networking that has stolen all of this public code and made it 
> unusable by all of us early developers.  I am ecstatic to have free 
> access to what you have done here, and I feel you are doing the world a 
> great favor by relieving it of the oppression of these wifi portal and 
> network hardware companies that have jacked the consumer cost of Wifi 
> through the roof.  
>

That's great.
 

> The point of your project is to serve the needs of the users, and get 
> adoption, right?
>

The goals of the project are stated 
here: http://openwisp.io/docs/general/values.html

Adoption will come with time. I'm not interested in rushing because in my 
experience it is harmful. OpenWISP1 was rushed into existence and once it 
did what it was designed to do, it couldn't do anything more than that and 
never became relevant outside of Italy (the country for which it was 
designed) with the result that many companies and organizations built 
softwares that were really similar to it but had the same flaws, never 
achieving any breakthrough.

Once I decided to fix all the issues I have seen and I started to work on 
NetJSON and OpenWISP 2 I had to do it against the opinion of a lot of 
people who tried to persuade me it was a bad idea because it would have 
taken too long and we needed something quickly, "That will take years! We 
need something now!". Do you think who wanted something now back then has 
achieved anything like what OpenWISP and NetJSON are achieving today?
The compound effect that this work is going to have in 10 years into the 
future cannot be estimated. People do not see this, they only focus about 
building a UI, building a product, but that has been done many times and it 
has failed many times and I'm not interested in doing it all over again. 
I'm working on this project for the long term.

You need to understand that if you want to work with OpenWISP.
 

>   I have already reprogrammed an Open-Mesh from scratch once, and if 
> Loren Wolsiffer at WifiGator can find that code, he has offered to jump 
> onboard also.  Even if he doesn't, what you have already done here- the 
> OpenWRT controller- *is* the heavy lifting that is required; the facelift 
> on top of that was already easy to make once, and the creation of a 
> distribution channel for ready-made hardware, as well as support for that 
> configuration- this is my offer for contribution to your project with a 
> number of programmers already on my staff working towards this very end. 
>

Different people have tried to do the same thing you are doing and have 
failed. It doesn't mean you will fail as well but I want to set it straight 
that what you are doing does not represent a contribution to the project.
The project did not improve an inch because of these discussions. The 
project can only improve with patient work on a feedback loop.

We were just working on this and adding crypto payment gateway to Cloudtrax 
> before Open-Mesh sold us all out.  Now we are here, and are willing to work 
> for you, but we are not doing it as an academic project,
>


What do you mean to say with "we are not doing it as an academic project"?

This is the kind of off-topic comment that you must avoid because it only 
fuels confusion. Please stop it.

I understand you are upset because Datto Networks has sent your business 
plan out of the window but please don't take that frustration here.

I'm sorry OpenWISP doesn't  have the magic wand you need to build your 
product.
 

> we need it to generate revenue from sales to average technical users, we 
> know marketing and sales, and are willing to spend the money to make this 
> happen.  
>
 
*Throwing money at the problem is not the solution.*

If you want to work with OpenWISP, you and your developers simply need to 
work patiently with us, follow the conventions the project is already 
following, avoid bringing up issues which are not technical or off-topic on 
this list (if you really want to do that you should take the discussion 
off-list).

If you don't want to do that I highly advice you to get a commercial 
agreement with some other company building a similar product.

So, to clarify, no I am not asking you to write any tutorial, I was only 
> asking you to distribute the templates shown in your YouTube video since it 
> would save everyone a lot of time, and if you would kindly consider taking 
> the time to answer the original question, which is what you mean by "an 
> ipam system for what you need to do is overkill" for auto assigning primary 
> router IP's, we can get to work programming all of these things for 
> OpenWISP.  
>

Great! So let's stop bringing up all the other issues about datto networks, 
open mesh, crypto, how the current OpenWISP UI is not good enough for 10 
years olds, that you're not building an academic project (totally 
inappropriate and out of the blue comment that you must learn to save for 
yourself) and focus on the technical questions and I'm sure next 
communications will go smoother.

An IPAM is a system used by organizations which manage big networks to 
assign IP, subnets and vlans to different departments, buildings, segments 
of their data center and so on and for what you described it is overkill. 
Moreover the IPAM module of OpenWISP is not ready for production usage nor 
released yet, so it's targeted only at developers who have the skills and 
patience to help us improve it gradually as we understand more and more how 
to make it better and integrate it properly with the rest of OpenWISP.

If you want to autoconfigure IP addresses in a mesh network there are other 
solutions for that which you should better ask in the forums / mailing list 
of the tools you're using to build the mesh network, so if you are using 
batman-advanced, I suggest you to ask this question in that community 
instead of here because there are more experts about batman-adv there than 
here and you have a higher chance of finding what you want.
There's also another popular mesh solution which is meant to be  easy to 
use for everybody: https://libremesh.org/ - but if you write to their list, 
I highly suggest you to focus on the technical aspects and avoid any other 
not-relevant comment.

The templates I have shown in my youtube videos and elsewhere in my 
presentations are already shared in the documentation of the OpenWRT 
configuration backend 
(http://netjsonconfig.openwisp.org/en/latest/backends/openwrt.html), I was 
using only layer2 802.11s with no batman-adv.

Whenever I needed to learn how to implement a use case in OpenWISP, whether 
it was a public wifi bridged to a layer2 VPN with OpenVPN, a mesh network 
with 802.11s, WPA2 Enterprise for eduroam, I dug up, looked on google, 
asked advice to other people in the OpenWRT community, did a lot of test, 
find out the configuration that worked and I've documented all I could, 
infact you can find all these things I'm citing in the netjsonconfig 
documentation.

I suggest you to do the same: do your own research to implement what you 
need and publish your findings. If you don't like the tooling with which 
the OpenWISP documentaton is built, publish your findings anywhere and in 
any way you prefer. Somebody else will help us to include your findings in 
the official documentation.

Federico

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