[B.A.T.M.A.N.] Status in IETF

[elektra <onelektra@gmx.net>]

Hello Dominik -

we have not submitted a draft to the IETF yet. Rather than
writing drafts according to IETF style about ideas, we are spending time
on improving the performance of our protocol by testing it in real life.
Within 12 months of development we have left behind B.A.T.M.A.N.-I and
B.A.T.M.A.N.-II. The successor of B.A.T.M.A.N.-III will be available in
the near future - I'm sure it will give the protocol a good boost in
performance. In my opinion the development cycle of many organizations
is slow because they are too bureaucratic and too occupied with
paperwork and their own hierarchical structure instead of developing
useful things. I like the informal character of our development. Our
research is a non-profit driven by fun and the will to empower people 
around the world to improve their communication on a grass root level. 
"On-line for all" is the agenda.

Of course hoity-toity people with ties, suits and long academic titles
tend to ignore a work of freaky people that don't bother about writing
texts in the style of codes of law. That's alright with me. In their
fancy-looking presentations about mesh-networks you see soldiers, tanks
and robots building a mesh on the battlefield or bugging devices for
their paranoid big-brother fantasies. I don't want to be supportive for
that kind of development. We can't avoid it because of the open nature
of open-source development. We are not doing things for our drawers or
to keep it as a secret.

Take the development of OLSR as an example. INRIA is still submitting
new drafts about ideas that we have found not feasible in real life in
the year 2004 when we did our first tests with 20 nodes on a conference
(Wizard of OS III) in Berlin.

Of course our documentation can and will be improved. It would be nice
if people find it easier to understand how B.A.T.M.A.N. works. But I
think a animation movie with comments would be much more helpful than a
text in the style of usual IETF documents.

I guess the development team will have no objections if someone is going 
to write a IETF-Draft about the final version of B.A.T.M.A.N.

We may write a draft of B.A.T.M.A.N.-IV as soon as it is properly 
implemented and thoroughly tested.

cu elektra