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I have had an enlightening meet-up with a colleague, and I think he has made some very good points about the feud that has started, and my role in it.
It's sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to see your own flaws, or the behaviours you're unaware of, even if they are very negative or unproductive, or have undesired consequences. My part in this, in retrospect, was unprofessional, and inconsiderate of the efforts of fellow engineers. I know that if I was in such a team, and was being criticised as I was doing, I'd probably feel the same way. So, my apologies for how I went about this.
I have toned down or removed statements in prior articles that were made in this vein. I don't think anyone gains in this relatively small tech space by being inflammatory. I honestly undertook the Meshtastic compatibility challenge in good faith, and had hopes of cooperation. For various reasons, I interpreted consequent behaviour, from others, as being hostile, and, like I said, reacted unprofessionally.
So, going forward I'd like this to be an open letter to Meshtastic that if they'd like to cooperate, then we could start a dialog, or if this is not desirable, for whatever reason, then fine.
I have suggested some possible paths, like a new open source MeshCore library, with a type of plugin-ability. I honestly, still don't understand what form of integration commercial 3rd parties can undertake with Meshtastic without open sourcing? Is a library that just does packet decoding and encoding possible under current licensing terms? The current source has a lot of dependencies and concepts that 3rd party projects don't need, like all the phone/app integration for instance. Having a 'core' that's decoupled from unnecessary features would make for more ways others could provide Meshtastic integrations, and be consistent with 'playing nice' in the mesh. But, I also get that this could be seen as dangerous, by the core devs, as it could also open up incompatibilities with the main, official firmware variants.
So, I really don't know what the answer is here, and, like I said, if we go our separate ways then that's fine. I mostly just want there to be innovation, and that the people who are into this weird space get a choice, as much as possible, and that even better solutions arrive, and thrive.
regards,
Scott Powell.