Present status
I intend for Spangap to be owned and cared for by the community of people who develop, extend and use it, and I released it under the Apache 2.0 licence — the licence for people that don’t want to spend their time thinking or talking about software licences. In a nutshell, this means you can use it in commercial software as well as part of software released under most other licences. You’re most welcome to contribute to it, as long as you certify that you did not include code covered by more restrictive licences or implement anything covered by patents, licence fees or the like.
Where it is
Spangap is not “done” — it will likely never be — or “stable”, hopefully sometime soon. It just got to a point where I feel it’s usable and documented enough that having other people play with it might produce a net gain for the project, instead of immediately driving me nuts helping others figure it out and making it work.
While it can be a foundation for your next project as is, beware that it’s very early days. You might find flaws or suboptimal solutions deep inside the project’s bowels, or end up developing alongside a fast-moving target.
The Reticulous mesh firmware can look mighty slick, but remember this is all very much alpha software. Things will shift, and important bits are either missing or will change shape. That said, it’s in a place where it can produce cool applications.
What happens next depends on you
Right now you’re one of the first people other than me looking at it. Someday soon we might have a growing ecosystem of straddles out in the wild, as well as a small community of people that build and improve some part of it. Spangap was always on the edge of what one person can chew on; further growth very much depends on you, the reader.
Please make yourselves at home, and if within your skillset and possibilities, please make yourselves useful. If you have complementary skills or experience, you will likely notice a few corners where you could do a better job than I did, and you’re most welcome to do so.
There’s no group chat or mailing list yet, but there will be a forum of some kind soon. Until then, a lot of things that are yet to be completely thought out are in my head, and I have some understanding of pitfalls that lie in various directions as well as my own ideas for what needs alteration or expansion. So feel free to contact me at rop@spangap.org if you’d like to touch base before digging in and/or doing substantial work.