I find this statement odd. In my opinion it doesn't make sense for different mesh projects to share a firmware project. These "firmwares" are all just OpenWRT with extra packages pre-installed and a bit of mesh-specific default configuration... sometimes some custom web gui stuff. Most of this will vary based on what the mesh project is trying to achieve.

New work in the form of additional features for OpenWRT should be put into OpenWRT or released in the form of OpenWRT packages. Useful configuration files and web guis can be shared, but will likely need to be adapted by the different groups

Let's have a look at these projects anyway:

  qmp does not support all of the devices we are using. It uses bmx6 which as far as I can tell is based on the now-abandoned batmand, and so runs in userland (ah!) and is layer 3. On top of that bmx6 it seems to have a worryingly small amount of documentation. qmp has a few tools that may be interesting, like a node map, but then again all mesh groups seem to have their own node map and little helper tools.

  libre-mesh.org is giving me a 502 bad gateway and archive.org does not have a copy of the site. Looking at the git repo it seems to consist of a few make files, a bit of addition to the openwrt web gui and a bit of configuration. It oddly installs both bmx6 _and_ batman-adv on all routers (we have lots of 4mb flash routers. space is an issue).

  villagetelco seems to be a for profit company (?). They support only their own hardware and two models of tp-link. It bundles SIP stuff and its goals seem to be very different from ours.

I'm sure someone who just wants an easy to deploy mesh solution and doesn't care too much about the specifics of the firmware could be happy with these solutions, but given our goals, basing our firmware on either of these projects would likely set us back more than it would help.

In my opinion, the correct solution for building a mesh firmware is to begin by identifying what the needs of the mesh project are, identify what functionality the firmware must have in order to best fulfill those needs, then find the best tools from OpenWRT or other mesh projects for the required functionality and finally combine them into a custom firmware.

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Marc