Please open source this library

[Juul]

Having an open source WiFi MAC on such an affordable device would be extremely useful for experimenters and researchers.

If you are worried about people disregarding the WiFi standard then that is already possible with other devices.

The existing open WiFi drivers for cheap routers such as the AR9xxx driver that exists for the Omega2 $5 OpenWRT-compatible micro-router is easily configurable in ways that are harmful, outside of the WiFi specification, and illegal in various countries.

Software Defined Radios allow complete control over the WiFi MAC and PHY and these devices are getting cheaper every year.

Many devices already speak other non-WiFi protocols on the same 2.4 GHz frequencies as WiFi and standards-compliant WiFi devices knows how to handle the interference.

If you open source the WiFi MAC then the rest of the world can help improve your firmware to make it the best microcontroller WiFi MAC available.

Given all of this I do not understand why you would keep the WiFi MAC closed.

[igrr]

Open sourcing the upper MAC layer is certainly on our roadmap.

This does require a fair amount of developer time though, because large codebase has to be refactored, cleaned up, and documented. At this point we see more benefit in spending developer resources on those many features missing from the ESP-IDF. As the ESP-IDF gets more feature complete, we will invest more time into MAC layer clean up and open sourcing.

[Juul]

Well that's great news!
You don't really need to clean up and refactor before releasing. As the open source mantra goes: Release early, release often. Having something is so much better than having nothing :)

If you release what you have now, we'll figure it out. We can even help you out! The point of having an open codebase is to have a constructive, bidirectional relationship with your users instead of releasing software for mere consumption.

[Spritetm]

The problem mostly is that what we have now isn't designed to be released and has developed some ball-of-yarn qualities. We need time to separate the bits of the MAC that we can open-source from the lower layers that need to stay closed because they contain IP-related sensitive information. As you can see, well, everywhere else in esp-idf, we're absolutely not against having a constructive and bidirectional relationship with our users; it's one of the reasons you see a gazillion commits to the esp-idf master branch and not a closed release full of binaries every x time! We just ask you to be patient on this one, we know it's a highly requested feature but due to the nature of the thing, we can't just throw it out in the open, sorry.

[Juul]

What would it take to open source the entire thing? Could we crowdfund however much it would take to buy the IP-protected parts free? How much would that cost and with whom would we negotiate?

[Spritetm]

I can't say... I'll pass it on, see if that is an option.

[Spritetm]

Sorry, just got a response; unfortunately in this case throwing money at the problem isn't going to help.

[ESP32DE]

Dear espressif

I am now at same thinking.

i do not want further more time wait for fixing things in the lib.
we are helpless if we build productive things on the way to LIBS
that are outdated or not fixed.

please open the libs that we can develope on Open Source way.

best wishes
rudi ;-)

[dobegor]

@igrr Sorry to bother you here, but can we get some status update on upper layer open sourcing process? This is essential for a production-grade systems built with ESP32. Thanks in advance.

[danielinux]

I am hearing rumors saying Espressif will never open source this library. That's a shame, especially because the company is just riding the open source wave to spread within the community.

All I can say, they only care about selling hardware along with their proprietary, closed-source, bad quality software.

All in all, great marketing play. Well done!

[igrr]

Folks, indeed the process is a long one, but we are taking steps in opening parts of these libraries. Since this issue was opened, significant portion of rtc library was released, and recently ets_timer implementation was opened as well. In the foreseeable future, some parts (such as the PHY library) are going to stay closed source. But the supplicant and eventually upper MAC layer will be opened. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

[kaofishy]

Does this apply to the Bluetooth part as well? Since BLE shares pretty much the same Phy as NRF24L01 it would be interesting to bypass the protocol stack to ease interoperability.

[flo90]

Hi @igrr.
I am currently writing my master thesis about energy saving in IEEE802.11. Beside other hardware I want to explore possibilities of the ESP32. But to do so, I need access to the wpa supplicant e.g. to restore key material and skip handshaking after deep sleep. The already implemented modem sleep gets close to another feature I need, except that I want to turning the modem off and on by myself instead of periodically. Do you see any problems doing so and can you tell me and all other people the current status? Maybe it would be a nice Christmas present opening the parts you announced ;-).
Thanks in advance!