[OpenWrt-Devel] [Battlemesh] Request for Feedback - prplwrt Software Support Program - initial draft

[Simon Wunderlich]

Hey Saverio,

On Wednesday 09 March 2016 09:58:57 Saverio Proto wrote:
> > I don't have a number off hand, that's still being decided. My feeling has
> > been that's it'd be in the tens of thousands USD total. I'll try to get
> > more of finalized amount as soon as possible.
> 
> Hello Eric,
> 
> considering that a Senior Engineer in the SF Bay Area has an average
> income of 120.000 USD per year... a contribution on terms of tens of
> thousands dollars does not cover even the work of one person for one
> year. Should we for this little money involve an american foundation
> in the decisional processes ?

who says that we have to involve them into a decisional process? All they do 
is offer money for some projects in which industry partners are interested in 
as well. Of course, bringing the contributions back to upstream should be made 
a requirement, but I don't really see anything bad in this.

If this model is succesful, maybe more funding will be made available.

For example, I remember talking to various companies back when I started DFS 
development, and they told me "hey our company would like to sponsor this as 
well since we will need it too". Pretty much everyone using Open Source 
drivers in 5 GHz needed that. I'm sure there are more features like this where 
industry has lots of interest, and having a platform specifically for OpenWRT 
(and surrounding ecosystem) which contributes to both industry and community 
is a good thing, no? At least I didn't want to shoot a fancy kickstarter video 
and go through all the pain, and luckily I found a sponsor for the initial 
development eventually ... :)

> 
> My feeling is that prpl is an American foundation that is throwing
> penauts to a successfull open source project to have development at
> low cost.
> A company that hires a team of developer for a Carrier Grade OpenWrt
> spends more than 100.000 USD per year in development cost.
> 
> You are right, there is a conflict between the community and prpl, so
> you have to convince us better :)

if I remember correctly there was quite some interest on GSoC all over the 
communities as well, where many people worked on various things for 5k per 
student. One of the restrictions there was the limited time/money available, 
which kept some interesting ideas out and focused on students with less 
experience, but in general I think its a good program (especially the 
requirement to give back the results).

I don't see this too politically (yes, I'd like better industry involvement 
too), but I think this would be a great platform to propose some nice ideas 
like WiFi developments and get funded on them. For example, some projects 
ideas which come to my mind are:

 * DFS for ad-hoc/mesh networks
 * WiFi spectral scan improvements
 * fair queueing in WiFi
 * TPC integration
 * Find a proper solution for the FCC problem

Some of them are already beeing worked on and are already funded, some are 
not, so whats wrong in getting them funded (or getting more ppl to work on 
them) through this channel? I don't see the harm. :)

Cheers,
     Simon
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