9 ms·

MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

285 points by wielebny 5mo ago

Trannosaur 5mo ago
What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Meshtastic is the same. One of the main reasons I got interested in MeshCore was reading the Meshtastic trademark rules and just finding them... really really over the top.
- tbyehl 5mo ago
  I don't know any of the players but I'd bet they're licensed amateur radio operators.
  - fooqux 5mo ago
    So?
    - busterarm 5mo ago
      IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others. That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
      - dostick 5mo ago
        What is IYKYK ? If you know you know?
        sweetheart 5mo ago
        yeah
        DrewADesign 5mo ago
        IYKYK
      - jimnotgym 5mo ago
        I have an amateur radio licence and I agree. One reason I rarely operate... I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
        busterarm 5mo ago
        It's kind of alarming how much more enjoyable the less legal communities in the radio hobby are to spend time around.
        DrewADesign 5mo ago
        I get the sense that a lot of the hams I’ve met have a framed hall-monitor sash from their high school years. I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
        toyg 5mo ago
        Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
        fragmede 5mo ago
        Hurt people hurt people, as they say. The entire field is held back because of trauma. "I could invent something amazing but get screwed out of it because someone else has money and lawyers" is just no way to live. The problem for radio is I could invent the most magical amazing transmitter, but it's worth absolutely nothing if there's no corresponding receiver. Which is to say, open standards are everything. Meshtastic/MeshCore/etc are interesting because they're open. It doesn't have to be. Off-grid mesh communication is a solved problem, just buy a GoTenna. Problem is it's proprietary. But it works, with a whole lot less drama.
      - bobsomers 5mo ago
        I don't really think its fair to lump hams into that behavioral bucket. It's certainly a personality type that tends to get attracted to lots of different technical hobbies.
        busterarm 5mo ago
        [flagged]
      - mystraline 5mo ago
        > IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types. I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump. Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community. And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF. I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
        busterarm 5mo ago
        It's not even just a pro-trump thing. That's not even the thing particularly annoying about hams because that's annoying across all of society. I can tolerate disagreeing with peoples opinions but not disagreeable/disharmonioous behavior. Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny. The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
        deleted 5mo ago
  - amatecha 5mo ago
    Actually the opposite, tons of ppl in the meshtastic community (Discord) berate amateur radio operators. I stopped even discussing the subject because of how much derision I observed or was subjected to. Lots of insults and nasty jokes in passing as soon as the topic even comes up whatsoever. Kinda like your post, actually - offhanded derogatory remarks about an entire group of people solely because of the hobby they're involved in.
    - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
      The person in question has many radios in the background of his videos, so maybe the comment you've replied to is into something :P
      - fooqux 5mo ago
        Eh, it's a stereotype. In my opinion, they should always be questioned, especially when it's an unkind one like this. Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
        celsoazevedo 5mo ago
        Yeah, you're right.
    - atomicthumbs 5mo ago
      is it because amateur radio operators legally have standards they have to comply with?
      - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
        This + amateur radio is designed to be open, no encryption, anyone can talk with anyone, and if you're "being stupid" (to not use other terms), anyone can tell you so. The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
  - linsomniac 5mo ago
    I will say in Northern Colorado a LOT of the people involved in the MeshCore are HAMs.
    - neltnerb 5mo ago
      Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam. You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun. I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out. Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing? At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case. So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
      - linsomniac 5mo ago
        I came up with a way to install a repeater 20ft up a mast that's been on top of the building my office is in, but it's been idle since the TV station that used to be in here left. It has decent reachability, but unfortunately it's not at a particularly high point of the city, it has great reacability into the University and can reach my house, but there's a ridge to the south that puts the antenna more like ground level if it was on that ridge.
        teachrdan 5mo ago
  - walrus01 5mo ago
    Speaking as a person who works professionally in fcc part 101 licensed point to point microwave systems carrying IP data, I have less than zero patience for the BS and shenanigans of analog ham radio enthusiasts. They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens. In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
    - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
      That's unique to american hams. Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
      - walrus01 5mo ago
        Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion. I can send an ICMP ping to something I know is in Svalbard Norway across the regular Internet and get a reply, but I don't pin a postcard to a cork board on my wall celebrating my amazing technical accomplishment. Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload. A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
        ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
        Sure, and walking uphill just do walk downhill is pointless too, and people are also bragging they've gone very far uphill to go very far back downhill,... they could be doing much more useful things instead of climbing mt. everest. Why bother, when you're higher than that (almost) every time you fly in a plane? But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube. Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
- queenkjuul 5mo ago
  All meshtastic code is GPL, the name "meshtastic" is owned by the company that developed it. You can use any of the code, you can't use their name outside their rules. This is absolutely no different than, say, Firefox. The trademark policy is very permissable and you don't even need their permission to use the name on a commercial product. I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.
  - toyg 5mo ago
    Nitpicking, but IIRC, Wi-Fi was born largely as a marketing effort rather than a technical one. Interoperability was an afterthought.
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      That's overstated. IEEE 802.11 started it all, and they're a standards body. The point of making a standard is to interoperate. Early implementations had problems with interoperability, yes, but interoperability was central to the ecosystem. "Wifi", as in the Wi-fi Alliance was absolutely a marketing thing because need marketing and branding to get consumer adoption but there was also a certification process to it that was a technical process and without that, it wouldn't have worked.
- celsoazevedo 5mo ago
  For now, I don't think it's fair to compare MeshCore with MeshTastic in terms of enforcement as that has not happened with MeshCore. This seems to be one guy getting a trademark in the UK without the approval of other members of the team. They're not going after anyone. Not yet, at least.
- mschuster91 5mo ago
  > What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out". Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.
- SchemaLoad 5mo ago
  I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.
  - cge 5mo ago
    In my experience, amateur radio (both licensed and license-free) and 3d printing both seem to have cultural perspectives on open source that differ considerably from the regular open source software community. But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious. What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents. [1]: https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed [2]: https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-connection-request/ https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-...
- pwndByDeath 5mo ago
  The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm
- zobzu 5mo ago
  they all hope to make lot of money of of it. meshcore has a marketing team spamming reddit all day and a mao to make you believe people use it right now. then you connect to yhe mesh and you're utterly alone there. at least meshtastic has real users lol.
the_gipsy 5mo ago
Is this client app still closed source? Non-starter for me, also a strong indicator that anything like this was bound to happen, and this will not be the end of it.
- queenkjuul 5mo ago
  Wow, very surprised to learn that it is closed source, and that's probably not changing. My local mesh was testing out meshcore last week, this definitely kills my interest too
  - drpfenderson 5mo ago
    Thankfully there is an open-source client, which has pretty much all the features of the main client as well as some extras. https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open
  - sidewndr46 5mo ago
    This reduced my interest to zero in this as well, when I learned it was closed source
    - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
      Search for "meshcore-open". It's an open client, still in alpha, but already does many of the basics. Github only for now, I believe.
  - marssaxman 5mo ago
    Shame to hear that: the protocol works well, scaling up to thousands of nodes across hundreds of miles. This is the local mesh where I live: https://cascadiamesh.org/map/ https://cascadiamesh.org/map/ You don't have to use the closed source app; there's an open-source client too, there are Blackberry-style client devices which don't require an app at all, and all the actual firmware is open source (MIT).
    - 5mo ago
desireco42 5mo ago
I love using AI to develop and I think it is important in modern development, but you definitely have to disclose it because there is a difference between AI and human written code is key. It is essential to disclose it.
- CyberDildonics 5mo ago
  You're right, I don't know who would down vote or disagree with this. It's not easy to figure out what a program is doing, but if someone wrote it you at least know there was some sort of intention there. With AI you have no idea why it's there. All over the internet people are putting up vibe coded projects and no one says that's what it is up front. They all just say "I made this" and they are more than happy to take in the adulation of people impressed that they made something with an animated pattern. Then when they finally admit that they wrote nothing and don't know how any of it works people start to say "nothing wrong with using ai", as if using it is the same as copying it verbatim, not understanding anything and taking complete credit as if you wrote it while lying about how it was used.
- preisschild 5mo ago
  Not only because of that, but if you vibe code huge parts of the project, it is questionable if you really have the rights to agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin and to license it under that specific code bases LICENSE.
brk 5mo ago
I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown. The "SHTF" types that get involved with this tend to just taint the whole concept for me. I was/am interested in the use cases for building sensor networks, but most of the chatter seems to be around people who just want to send Hello World type texts back and forth, without realizing how poorly a network like this would perform in a real SHTF scenario.
- Insanity 5mo ago
  SHTF?
  - brk 5mo ago
    Shit Hits The Fan.
  - EdwardDiego 5mo ago
    Often refers to doomsday preppers.
- RankingMember 5mo ago
  I feel the same way, and both mobile apps are pretty janky, with Meshtastic being extra obnoxious because the UI teams between Android and Apple apparently don't talk to each other- very hard to onboard/answer questions from someone new if you're on a different platform than them. It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.
- alnwlsn 5mo ago
  I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS where you walk around a large camp and "capture" different regions. It worked great for that and was a lot of fun. If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing. To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.
lukeasch21 5mo ago
I would absolutely encourage everyone reading this to check out Reticulum [1] if you haven't already. I believe the base project might be in need of new maintainers(?) at the moment and the main dev has some very strong takes, but it is a very well-thought out approach to distributed networking at the protocol layer. The existing implementations out there include a desktop app which can function over the internet (IP) or a USB connection to some existing LoRA boards. I recently purchased a LilyGo T-Echo [2] and have had a great experience flashing the open-source firmware and using it connected to a desktop over USB or connected over Bluetooth to the fantastic new companion app Columba [3]. This app seriously makes Reticulum feel like a first class citizen when it comes to parity support for messaging. You can even send files/images (with limitations of course)! And since it works at the network level, you can make your own apps to run over Reticulum as well. [1] https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ [2] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-echo-lilygo https://lilygo.cc/products/t-echo-lilygo [3] https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba
- LaserBeam1000 5mo ago
  I've never seen a working Reticulum network in the wild. Only very very small testbeds.
  - forkerenok 5mo ago
    There are tons of entry points available now [0], and I get thousands of announcements every day. https://rmap.world/ https://rmap.world/ It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
    - fooqux 5mo ago
      I'd love to get a node working just for fun. But it also seems like a waste since I'm extremely rural. The closest node is 200+ miles away. The chances of seeing any other device but my own connect to it seem slim. Is there still a reason to do this?
mtlynch 5mo ago
>Would you trust AI generated mesh firmware? It's ridiculous to me that they're concerned about the trustworthiness of AI-generated code when their code quality is so low. They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3] Last I checked, there's little validity checking in the code, so it's possible to broadcast nonsense values (like GPS coordinates outside of Earth's bounds) and the code happily accepts it. And that's fine if they're just like a scrappy upstart doing their best, but it annoys me to be so high and mighty about their code quality when they don't invest in it. I really want to like MeshCore but I feel like its stewardship makes it hard. The main two people I know running it are Scott Powell and Liam Cottle, both of whom are trying to build businesses on closed-source layers on top of the firmware. I don't think there's anything wrong with an open-core business model (I ran such a business myself), but it creates perverse incentives where the core maintainers try to suppress information about the open-source alternatives and push their own closed-source paid products. Also, MeshCore's recommended broadcast settings for the US are illegal.[4] I emailed the Liam and Scott about this months ago, and they ignored me. [0] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/925 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/925 [1] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1059 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1059 [2] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/1065 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/1065 [3] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/meshcore.js/pull/11 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/meshcore.js/pull/11 [4] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945
- jstanley 5mo ago
  What's an example of a GPS coordinate "outside earth's bounds"?
  - mtlynch 5mo ago
    A longitude that's outside the range of [-180, +180] or a latitude that's outside the range of [-90, +90].
    - jstanley 5mo ago
thih9 5mo ago
As they say, there is an .io[1] website with the "MESHCORE" logo, and a .co.uk[2] website with the "MESHCORE(tm)" logo. [1]: https://meshcore.io https://meshcore.io [2]: https://meshcore.co.uk https://meshcore.co.uk
jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
Spicy take but I think this whole Lora thing is a dead end bad technology not worth our time. Wifi HaLow 802.11ah is finally out & available, sometimes at ok prices. We don't really have ad-hoc communication pioneered for wifi, but it's doable and we ought lean into it, rather than using some totally different stack, especially one that is under strict control of a single company. What we learn doing wifi halow can directly port and improve the rest of ways we connect. That would be grand.
- HNisCIS 5mo ago
  Eh, I've played with 802.11ah and it's very long range for the power, but way too stateful for the use case that these mesh protocols serve. If you go out of range it's several seconds to re-establish a connection. I've worked with proper mesh radios (Silvus, etc) and they work very differently.
- Avamander 5mo ago
  The 802.11ah offerings right now are a mess though. Mostly proprietary and just generally very buggy. I don't know of a single chip that can actually be used with up-to-date Linux. Do you? Be it Morse Micro, Newracom, Taixin or any other, they all suck in some aspect. Hostapd people also do not seem interested in bringing in any 802.11ah support. So it's crap in that aspect as well. Drivers all fake 802.11n or the chipset offers some garbage AT-command interface and does all of the networking. On the other hand MeshCore and Meshtastic have similarly terrible codebases as far as I've seen. At least they're somewhat usable though. Honestly no clue why these software stacks are all this dangerously written, unstable and haven't improved in years.
  - KurSix 5mo ago
    Mesh networking is still mostly a playground for hobbyists and hacky, built-on-the-knee implementations. People love shipping a cool PoC, but as soon as the boring stuff starts - stabilization, drivers, edge cases - everyone bails to chase the next hype protocol. We’re left with mountains of half-baked C++ legacy that nobody dares to refactor because the whole house of cards would collapse iirc
nonethewiser 5mo ago
>We have always been wary of AI generated code, but felt everyone is free to do what they want and experiment, etc. But, one of our own, Andy Kirby, decided to branch out and extensively use Claude Code, and has decided to aggressively take over all of the components of the MeshCore ecosystem: standalone devices, mobile app, web flasher and web config tools. >And, he’s kept that small detail a secret - that it’s all majority vibe coded. Without any more context, I am highly suspicious of this framing. 1) Someone "taking over" the ecosystem seems like an entirely different issue. How is this possible? Does it mean he's publishing things and people want to use them? 2) Is the code bad? It sounds like they had no idea he was using AI. That seems to imply there was nothing wrong with the code as-is. Why not judge it on it's merits? >The team didn’t feel it was our place to protest, until we recently discovered that Andy applied for the MeshCore Trademark (on the 29th March, according to filings) and didn’t tell any of us. Taking this at face value, this is indeed hostile and bad. But no, I'm not going to get outraged that someone is simply using Claude Code.
- prism56 5mo ago
  Agreed. I use meshcore and have multiple repeaters setup. I don't care about people using ai assisted coding but I think it should be disclosed especially if its closed source. Now the trademark take over seems crazy especially given Andy hasn't contributed to the github project, only personal for profit add ons. I do also think that the meshcore core team have "tacked on" and tried to enforce a stronger narrative with their anti ai coding bias.
  - consp 5mo ago
    > only personal for profit add ons In that context it is quite logical to take a trademark out once the project is mature enough so you can profit off other people's work. Considering their user base does not like the hidden vibe coded idea I don't think this is bias but a sane rationalisation.
    - bigiain 5mo ago
      "I wrote an iPhone app, so now I have the right to trademark 'Apple'."
tamimio 5mo ago
Ah, the cliche story of most open source projects! Still, that was a dick move to hijack the project just because you were the “front end” or the promoter, and found that AI can help so you backstabbed the team and hijacked the trademark as well, class A a-hole! Just a word of caution, claude code might look impressive if your knowledge is shallow or intermediate in a topic, but if you know what you’re doing, once you dig deeper it starts to introduce plenty of scope creeps into your code base, piling one on top of another that you won’t even recognize your own code shortly.
- KurSix 5mo ago
  It’s hilarious how people are blaming Claude for a human being a total snake. Trademark squatting is the oldest legal trick in the book. AI just gave Andy the leverage to fake "official" status and look busy while the rest of the team did the actual heavy lifting. The tech just fast-tracked the inevitable fallout tbh
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
MBCook 5mo ago
I’ve never used this project and don’t know anyone involved. But it sure seems interesting how every time I hear about someone just doing a “rewrite it all with AI“ they seem to turn out to be a giant jerk. Maybe not the only one. I don’t know enough backstory to judge how trustworthy this post is. But the signal to noise ratio on my little test above seems pretty good.
webprofusion 5mo ago
The key takeaway from this is that drama loving dinosaurs live among us. Moving on.
- webprofusion 5mo ago
  I'm ignoring the attempted trademark trickery because TLDR; blah AI is evil blah blah other stuff.
jolly-good 5mo ago
Aggressive promotion by badmouthing any other mesh, and now this - seems rather British. :)
KurSix 5mo ago
It’s funny how a standard power grab over cash and control is being packaged as some "Holy War against AI" Highlighting the Claude usage in the headline is a blatant move to bait the anti-AI crowd and farm sympathy points. The real issue has nothing to do with who generated the AST -whether it was meat-ware or a transformer - the issue is the brand hijacking. Stop dragging technology into this; it’s just pure legal scumbaggery
mg794613 5mo ago
Lovely, another open source rugpull. Is this the new way? Attract a lot of developers, and when you think you can sell the product , you take all their code and call it your own. Has this worked out for someone so far?
sealWithIt 5mo ago
I think it was a good decision. I just spent a couple weeks doing experiments with meshcore/meshtastic/reticulum/... comparing them to our stealth solution and I experienced a functional core in meshcore surrounded by a lot of vibe coded slop. In particular I did not like the shoddy documentation of the various vibe coded interfaces and how brittle the integration experience felt because of them.
tiagod 5mo ago
I came across this Andy Kirby guy on youtube, and his videos really came across as very sensationalized, exaggerated and clickbaity, which drew me away from meshcore, as I associated him with the project organization. This seems to validate my gut feeling.

285 points by wielebny 5mo ago

What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Meshtastic is the same. One of the main reasons I got interested in MeshCore was reading the Meshtastic trademark rules and just finding them... really really over the top.

tbyehl 5mo ago
I don't know any of the players but I'd bet they're licensed amateur radio operators.
- fooqux 5mo ago
  So?
  - busterarm 5mo ago
    IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others. That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
    - dostick 5mo ago
      What is IYKYK ? If you know you know?
      - sweetheart 5mo ago
        yeah
      - DrewADesign 5mo ago
        IYKYK
    - jimnotgym 5mo ago
      I have an amateur radio licence and I agree. One reason I rarely operate... I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
      - busterarm 5mo ago
        It's kind of alarming how much more enjoyable the less legal communities in the radio hobby are to spend time around.
        DrewADesign 5mo ago
        I get the sense that a lot of the hams I’ve met have a framed hall-monitor sash from their high school years. I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
      - toyg 5mo ago
        Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
        fragmede 5mo ago
        Hurt people hurt people, as they say. The entire field is held back because of trauma. "I could invent something amazing but get screwed out of it because someone else has money and lawyers" is just no way to live. The problem for radio is I could invent the most magical amazing transmitter, but it's worth absolutely nothing if there's no corresponding receiver. Which is to say, open standards are everything. Meshtastic/MeshCore/etc are interesting because they're open. It doesn't have to be. Off-grid mesh communication is a solved problem, just buy a GoTenna. Problem is it's proprietary. But it works, with a whole lot less drama.
    - bobsomers 5mo ago
      I don't really think its fair to lump hams into that behavioral bucket. It's certainly a personality type that tends to get attracted to lots of different technical hobbies.
      - busterarm 5mo ago
        [flagged]
    - mystraline 5mo ago
      > IYKYK. Hams are known for a distinctive personality type that can be at strong odds from other tech people and other comms people. Usually in ways that clash with consequences. Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types. I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump. Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community. And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF. I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
      - busterarm 5mo ago
        It's not even just a pro-trump thing. That's not even the thing particularly annoying about hams because that's annoying across all of society. I can tolerate disagreeing with peoples opinions but not disagreeable/disharmonioous behavior. Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny. The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
        deleted 5mo ago
- amatecha 5mo ago
  Actually the opposite, tons of ppl in the meshtastic community (Discord) berate amateur radio operators. I stopped even discussing the subject because of how much derision I observed or was subjected to. Lots of insults and nasty jokes in passing as soon as the topic even comes up whatsoever. Kinda like your post, actually - offhanded derogatory remarks about an entire group of people solely because of the hobby they're involved in.
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    The person in question has many radios in the background of his videos, so maybe the comment you've replied to is into something :P
    - fooqux 5mo ago
      Eh, it's a stereotype. In my opinion, they should always be questioned, especially when it's an unkind one like this. Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
      - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
        Yeah, you're right.
  - atomicthumbs 5mo ago
    is it because amateur radio operators legally have standards they have to comply with?
    - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
      This + amateur radio is designed to be open, no encryption, anyone can talk with anyone, and if you're "being stupid" (to not use other terms), anyone can tell you so. The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
- linsomniac 5mo ago
  I will say in Northern Colorado a LOT of the people involved in the MeshCore are HAMs.
  - neltnerb 5mo ago
    Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam. You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun. I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out. Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing? At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case. So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
    - linsomniac 5mo ago
      I came up with a way to install a repeater 20ft up a mast that's been on top of the building my office is in, but it's been idle since the TV station that used to be in here left. It has decent reachability, but unfortunately it's not at a particularly high point of the city, it has great reacability into the University and can reach my house, but there's a ridge to the south that puts the antenna more like ground level if it was on that ridge.
      - teachrdan 5mo ago
- walrus01 5mo ago
  Speaking as a person who works professionally in fcc part 101 licensed point to point microwave systems carrying IP data, I have less than zero patience for the BS and shenanigans of analog ham radio enthusiasts. They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens. In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
  - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
    That's unique to american hams. Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
    - walrus01 5mo ago
      Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion. I can send an ICMP ping to something I know is in Svalbard Norway across the regular Internet and get a reply, but I don't pin a postcard to a cork board on my wall celebrating my amazing technical accomplishment. Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload. A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
      - ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
        Sure, and walking uphill just do walk downhill is pointless too, and people are also bragging they've gone very far uphill to go very far back downhill,... they could be doing much more useful things instead of climbing mt. everest. Why bother, when you're higher than that (almost) every time you fly in a plane? But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube. Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
queenkjuul 5mo ago
All meshtastic code is GPL, the name "meshtastic" is owned by the company that developed it. You can use any of the code, you can't use their name outside their rules. This is absolutely no different than, say, Firefox. The trademark policy is very permissable and you don't even need their permission to use the name on a commercial product. I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.
- toyg 5mo ago
  Nitpicking, but IIRC, Wi-Fi was born largely as a marketing effort rather than a technical one. Interoperability was an afterthought.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    That's overstated. IEEE 802.11 started it all, and they're a standards body. The point of making a standard is to interoperate. Early implementations had problems with interoperability, yes, but interoperability was central to the ecosystem. "Wifi", as in the Wi-fi Alliance was absolutely a marketing thing because need marketing and branding to get consumer adoption but there was also a certification process to it that was a technical process and without that, it wouldn't have worked.
celsoazevedo 5mo ago
For now, I don't think it's fair to compare MeshCore with MeshTastic in terms of enforcement as that has not happened with MeshCore. This seems to be one guy getting a trademark in the UK without the approval of other members of the team. They're not going after anyone. Not yet, at least.
mschuster91 5mo ago
> What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers? Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out". Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.
SchemaLoad 5mo ago
I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.
- cge 5mo ago
  In my experience, amateur radio (both licensed and license-free) and 3d printing both seem to have cultural perspectives on open source that differ considerably from the regular open source software community. But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious. What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents. [1]: https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed [2]: https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-connection-request/ https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-...
pwndByDeath 5mo ago
The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm
zobzu 5mo ago
they all hope to make lot of money of of it. meshcore has a marketing team spamming reddit all day and a mao to make you believe people use it right now. then you connect to yhe mesh and you're utterly alone there. at least meshtastic has real users lol.

the_gipsy 5mo ago

Is this client app still closed source? Non-starter for me, also a strong indicator that anything like this was bound to happen, and this will not be the end of it.

queenkjuul 5mo ago
Wow, very surprised to learn that it is closed source, and that's probably not changing. My local mesh was testing out meshcore last week, this definitely kills my interest too
- drpfenderson 5mo ago
  Thankfully there is an open-source client, which has pretty much all the features of the main client as well as some extras. https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open
- sidewndr46 5mo ago
  This reduced my interest to zero in this as well, when I learned it was closed source
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    Search for "meshcore-open". It's an open client, still in alpha, but already does many of the basics. Github only for now, I believe.
- marssaxman 5mo ago
  Shame to hear that: the protocol works well, scaling up to thousands of nodes across hundreds of miles. This is the local mesh where I live: https://cascadiamesh.org/map/ https://cascadiamesh.org/map/ You don't have to use the closed source app; there's an open-source client too, there are Blackberry-style client devices which don't require an app at all, and all the actual firmware is open source (MIT).
  - 5mo ago

desireco42 5mo ago

I love using AI to develop and I think it is important in modern development, but you definitely have to disclose it because there is a difference between AI and human written code is key. It is essential to disclose it.

CyberDildonics 5mo ago
You're right, I don't know who would down vote or disagree with this. It's not easy to figure out what a program is doing, but if someone wrote it you at least know there was some sort of intention there. With AI you have no idea why it's there. All over the internet people are putting up vibe coded projects and no one says that's what it is up front. They all just say "I made this" and they are more than happy to take in the adulation of people impressed that they made something with an animated pattern. Then when they finally admit that they wrote nothing and don't know how any of it works people start to say "nothing wrong with using ai", as if using it is the same as copying it verbatim, not understanding anything and taking complete credit as if you wrote it while lying about how it was used.
preisschild 5mo ago
Not only because of that, but if you vibe code huge parts of the project, it is questionable if you really have the rights to agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin and to license it under that specific code bases LICENSE.

brk 5mo ago

I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown. The "SHTF" types that get involved with this tend to just taint the whole concept for me. I was/am interested in the use cases for building sensor networks, but most of the chatter seems to be around people who just want to send Hello World type texts back and forth, without realizing how poorly a network like this would perform in a real SHTF scenario.

Insanity 5mo ago
SHTF?
- brk 5mo ago
  Shit Hits The Fan.
- EdwardDiego 5mo ago
  Often refers to doomsday preppers.
RankingMember 5mo ago
I feel the same way, and both mobile apps are pretty janky, with Meshtastic being extra obnoxious because the UI teams between Android and Apple apparently don't talk to each other- very hard to onboard/answer questions from someone new if you're on a different platform than them. It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.
alnwlsn 5mo ago
I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS where you walk around a large camp and "capture" different regions. It worked great for that and was a lot of fun. If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing. To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.

lukeasch21 5mo ago

I would absolutely encourage everyone reading this to check out Reticulum [1] if you haven't already. I believe the base project might be in need of new maintainers(?) at the moment and the main dev has some very strong takes, but it is a very well-thought out approach to distributed networking at the protocol layer. The existing implementations out there include a desktop app which can function over the internet (IP) or a USB connection to some existing LoRA boards. I recently purchased a LilyGo T-Echo [2] and have had a great experience flashing the open-source firmware and using it connected to a desktop over USB or connected over Bluetooth to the fantastic new companion app Columba [3]. This app seriously makes Reticulum feel like a first class citizen when it comes to parity support for messaging. You can even send files/images (with limitations of course)! And since it works at the network level, you can make your own apps to run over Reticulum as well. [1] https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ [2] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-echo-lilygo https://lilygo.cc/products/t-echo-lilygo [3] https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba

LaserBeam1000 5mo ago
I've never seen a working Reticulum network in the wild. Only very very small testbeds.
- forkerenok 5mo ago
  There are tons of entry points available now [0], and I get thousands of announcements every day. https://rmap.world/ https://rmap.world/ It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
  - fooqux 5mo ago
    I'd love to get a node working just for fun. But it also seems like a waste since I'm extremely rural. The closest node is 200+ miles away. The chances of seeing any other device but my own connect to it seem slim. Is there still a reason to do this?

mtlynch 5mo ago

>Would you trust AI generated mesh firmware? It's ridiculous to me that they're concerned about the trustworthiness of AI-generated code when their code quality is so low. They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3] Last I checked, there's little validity checking in the code, so it's possible to broadcast nonsense values (like GPS coordinates outside of Earth's bounds) and the code happily accepts it. And that's fine if they're just like a scrappy upstart doing their best, but it annoys me to be so high and mighty about their code quality when they don't invest in it. I really want to like MeshCore but I feel like its stewardship makes it hard. The main two people I know running it are Scott Powell and Liam Cottle, both of whom are trying to build businesses on closed-source layers on top of the firmware. I don't think there's anything wrong with an open-core business model (I ran such a business myself), but it creates perverse incentives where the core maintainers try to suppress information about the open-source alternatives and push their own closed-source paid products. Also, MeshCore's recommended broadcast settings for the US are illegal.[4] I emailed the Liam and Scott about this months ago, and they ignored me. [0] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/925 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/925 [1] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1059 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1059 [2] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/1065 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/1065 [3] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/meshcore.js/pull/11 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/meshcore.js/pull/11 [4] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945 https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945

jstanley 5mo ago
What's an example of a GPS coordinate "outside earth's bounds"?
- mtlynch 5mo ago
  A longitude that's outside the range of [-180, +180] or a latitude that's outside the range of [-90, +90].
  - jstanley 5mo ago

thih9 5mo ago

As they say, there is an .io[1] website with the "MESHCORE" logo, and a .co.uk[2] website with the "MESHCORE(tm)" logo. [1]: https://meshcore.io https://meshcore.io [2]: https://meshcore.co.uk https://meshcore.co.uk

jauntywundrkind 5mo ago

Spicy take but I think this whole Lora thing is a dead end bad technology not worth our time. Wifi HaLow 802.11ah is finally out & available, sometimes at ok prices. We don't really have ad-hoc communication pioneered for wifi, but it's doable and we ought lean into it, rather than using some totally different stack, especially one that is under strict control of a single company. What we learn doing wifi halow can directly port and improve the rest of ways we connect. That would be grand.

HNisCIS 5mo ago
Eh, I've played with 802.11ah and it's very long range for the power, but way too stateful for the use case that these mesh protocols serve. If you go out of range it's several seconds to re-establish a connection. I've worked with proper mesh radios (Silvus, etc) and they work very differently.
Avamander 5mo ago
The 802.11ah offerings right now are a mess though. Mostly proprietary and just generally very buggy. I don't know of a single chip that can actually be used with up-to-date Linux. Do you? Be it Morse Micro, Newracom, Taixin or any other, they all suck in some aspect. Hostapd people also do not seem interested in bringing in any 802.11ah support. So it's crap in that aspect as well. Drivers all fake 802.11n or the chipset offers some garbage AT-command interface and does all of the networking. On the other hand MeshCore and Meshtastic have similarly terrible codebases as far as I've seen. At least they're somewhat usable though. Honestly no clue why these software stacks are all this dangerously written, unstable and haven't improved in years.
- KurSix 5mo ago
  Mesh networking is still mostly a playground for hobbyists and hacky, built-on-the-knee implementations. People love shipping a cool PoC, but as soon as the boring stuff starts - stabilization, drivers, edge cases - everyone bails to chase the next hype protocol. We’re left with mountains of half-baked C++ legacy that nobody dares to refactor because the whole house of cards would collapse iirc

nonethewiser 5mo ago

>We have always been wary of AI generated code, but felt everyone is free to do what they want and experiment, etc. But, one of our own, Andy Kirby, decided to branch out and extensively use Claude Code, and has decided to aggressively take over all of the components of the MeshCore ecosystem: standalone devices, mobile app, web flasher and web config tools. >And, he’s kept that small detail a secret - that it’s all majority vibe coded. Without any more context, I am highly suspicious of this framing. 1) Someone "taking over" the ecosystem seems like an entirely different issue. How is this possible? Does it mean he's publishing things and people want to use them? 2) Is the code bad? It sounds like they had no idea he was using AI. That seems to imply there was nothing wrong with the code as-is. Why not judge it on it's merits? >The team didn’t feel it was our place to protest, until we recently discovered that Andy applied for the MeshCore Trademark (on the 29th March, according to filings) and didn’t tell any of us. Taking this at face value, this is indeed hostile and bad. But no, I'm not going to get outraged that someone is simply using Claude Code.

prism56 5mo ago
Agreed. I use meshcore and have multiple repeaters setup. I don't care about people using ai assisted coding but I think it should be disclosed especially if its closed source. Now the trademark take over seems crazy especially given Andy hasn't contributed to the github project, only personal for profit add ons. I do also think that the meshcore core team have "tacked on" and tried to enforce a stronger narrative with their anti ai coding bias.
- consp 5mo ago
  > only personal for profit add ons In that context it is quite logical to take a trademark out once the project is mature enough so you can profit off other people's work. Considering their user base does not like the hidden vibe coded idea I don't think this is bias but a sane rationalisation.
  - bigiain 5mo ago
    "I wrote an iPhone app, so now I have the right to trademark 'Apple'."

tamimio 5mo ago

Ah, the cliche story of most open source projects! Still, that was a dick move to hijack the project just because you were the “front end” or the promoter, and found that AI can help so you backstabbed the team and hijacked the trademark as well, class A a-hole! Just a word of caution, claude code might look impressive if your knowledge is shallow or intermediate in a topic, but if you know what you’re doing, once you dig deeper it starts to introduce plenty of scope creeps into your code base, piling one on top of another that you won’t even recognize your own code shortly.

KurSix 5mo ago
It’s hilarious how people are blaming Claude for a human being a total snake. Trademark squatting is the oldest legal trick in the book. AI just gave Andy the leverage to fake "official" status and look busy while the rest of the team did the actual heavy lifting. The tech just fast-tracked the inevitable fallout tbh

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

MBCook 5mo ago

I’ve never used this project and don’t know anyone involved. But it sure seems interesting how every time I hear about someone just doing a “rewrite it all with AI“ they seem to turn out to be a giant jerk. Maybe not the only one. I don’t know enough backstory to judge how trustworthy this post is. But the signal to noise ratio on my little test above seems pretty good.

webprofusion 5mo ago

The key takeaway from this is that drama loving dinosaurs live among us. Moving on.

webprofusion 5mo ago
I'm ignoring the attempted trademark trickery because TLDR; blah AI is evil blah blah other stuff.

jolly-good 5mo ago

Aggressive promotion by badmouthing any other mesh, and now this - seems rather British. :)

KurSix 5mo ago

It’s funny how a standard power grab over cash and control is being packaged as some "Holy War against AI" Highlighting the Claude usage in the headline is a blatant move to bait the anti-AI crowd and farm sympathy points. The real issue has nothing to do with who generated the AST -whether it was meat-ware or a transformer - the issue is the brand hijacking. Stop dragging technology into this; it’s just pure legal scumbaggery

mg794613 5mo ago

Lovely, another open source rugpull. Is this the new way? Attract a lot of developers, and when you think you can sell the product , you take all their code and call it your own. Has this worked out for someone so far?

sealWithIt 5mo ago

I think it was a good decision. I just spent a couple weeks doing experiments with meshcore/meshtastic/reticulum/... comparing them to our stealth solution and I experienced a functional core in meshcore surrounded by a lot of vibe coded slop. In particular I did not like the shoddy documentation of the various vibe coded interfaces and how brittle the integration experience felt because of them.

tiagod 5mo ago

I came across this Andy Kirby guy on youtube, and his videos really came across as very sensationalized, exaggerated and clickbaity, which drew me away from meshcore, as I associated him with the project organization. This seems to validate my gut feeling.