mechanisms tied to mesh: "under a tree" collab

[John Gilmore]

[I posted bug #8524 re lease activation not working on AP's.]

Another mechanism that only works on Mesh is sharing "under a tree".

It's perfectly feasible for four or five kids with laptops, all
sitting under a tree, to share over ad-hoc 802.11 mode.  They don't
need a mesh that forwards packets; they can all hear each other on the
radio just fine.  Mac laptops do this, for example, using the standard
Zeroconf protocols to assign IP addresses to themselves, and find each
other by name with mdns.

OLPC's collaboration infrastructure doesn't support this -- or if some
underlying layer does, there's no UI for it.  There's no way for the
user to tell the laptop, "Talk to other nearby laptops -- without the
mesh, without an access point".

Future hardware might well want to discard the complicated and
power-hungry mesh option, since we really aren't using it anyway,
except for lease activation and this "under a tree" scenario.  That
would give us lots more choices on future WiFi hardware.  If we fix
collab to work in ad-hoc mode under a tree, and when two or more
machines are plugged-together via Ethernet without a server, then not
only will our future products have that choice, but also, our collab
stuff will be MUCH easier to drop into ordinary Linux distros and
applications.

It seems to me that this would achieve a big piece of OLPC's original
software goals -- to spawn a revolution in free software applications
that support and encourage online collaboration.  (Divorcing the
collab support from the OLPC-unique Sugar GUI is also a prerequisite
for making that happen.)

	John