[WLANware] OLSR GUI for masses

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Hi!

(I am writing to all of you because you have proposed OLSR GUI in one
way or another. I am also CCing our mailing list.)

So the competition part of GSoC is over. Now starts collaboration part
(the part we were all waiting for).

I would first like to congratulate Charles for being accepted. And I
would like to stress that we all are sad that we could not simply
accept everyone as all of you had good proposals and have made an
impression that you would be able to pull things through. But we had
to choose.

But not everything is lost. OK, money prize is lost, but you can still
work on your proposals, learn new things, gain experience and
knowledge, get acquainted with open source, open communities,
interesting people, build something for people to use and be happy and
angry about (you can never satisfy everybody) and to show to your
grandchildren what have you done this summer of 2010 when you were a
student. Even more, I have some ideas how we could all collaborate
together and combine different proposals. So please tell me if you
would like to work anyway and what would you like to work on most, so
that we can maybe find some combination for everybody.

For example, some ideas.

We could combine special OLSR GUI for mobile phones with generic GUI
for PCs. Because once we design what GUI needs and once we add all
necessary things into OLSR codebase, it should be (in theory) quite
easy just to make GUIs on different platforms for all this features we
will envision. (OK, it will be a little bit harder on Android, but we
have Charles to cover this.) I like approach which is Transmission
bittorrent client using:

http://www.transmissionbt.com/

They have made a great underlying lib and then they build upon it
different GUIs for different platforms with native tools and native
look&feel. And also a web interface. And console interface.

And then another idea, which is mostly question if Anthony would like
to do it. And that is that we could also make some abstraction on
routing part and thus we could make a generic GUI for OLSR and Babel
(and maybe some day B.A.T.M.A.N.) which would run on different
platforms. Wouldn't it be great if you could just have an app on your
PC or mobile phone and once you would connect to any open wireless
network it would choose proper routing protocol used in this network
and connect you automagically. This would really open our networks to
masses.

So, please tell me if this is interesting enough for you to
participate anyway. And I will understand if you would not like to.


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