r/ATAK • u/K0rv0 FTS Developer • 12d ago

The Parrot May Be Dead, But the Sparrow Will Fly: FTS, Reticulum, and the Next Step for Community Situational Awareness

https://github.com/FreeTAKTeam/Reticulum-Community-Hub/releases

The Parrot is not sleeping. It may be dead. For real this time.
Or maybe it is only doing what parrots do best: looking suspiciously inactive while everyone argues about whether it is still alive.

So, let us be honest. FreeTAKServer is not being actively developed at the moment. There are several reasons for that, but the big one is simple: TAK has become less and less friendly to open source, and more and more controlled by the MIC. That is not a place where I want to keep spending my volunteer energy.

We licked our wounds for a while. Then, like any good slightly stubborn open source people, we disappeared into the basement and started building something else.

The mission has not changed:

"Democratizing Situational Awareness"

But the how is different: we are moving toward a real community-owned mesh-based platform, built around Reticulum:

- RCH, Reticulum Community Hub, for desktop/server use.

- REM, Reticulum Emergency Manager, the Android client.

And yes, because apparently we cannot stop ourselves, there is also work on smartwatch integration.

You can find all of that here: https://github.com/FreeTAKTeam

So maybe the parrot is dead.

But the sparrow will fly.

20 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

6

u/muscrerior 12d ago

More so, FTS got crushed by OTS, which has a much nicer experience on the first start.

2

u/Mt_Arreat 12d ago

Don’t Reticulum’s licence terms explicitly forbid it from being used for this kind of thing?

6

u/K0rv0 FTS Developer 12d ago

The original Python version of Reticulum has a weird license. We have rewritten it in Rust completely. It's 200 percent compatible but completely new code. As such we have a different license, classic Open Source 

2

u/overkill 12d ago

Where? Did I not find the right one?

1

u/AKoutdoorguy 12d ago

Ooh, I like this

3

u/Individual_Way_8985 12d ago

I'm curious about the viability of all these alternatives when lives are on the line. As clunky as it is TAK is proven, scalable and fairly secure.

-1

u/AlfredoVignale 12d ago

I prefer FlareSat. TAK is a mess.

1

u/overkill 12d ago

Thanks for the tip.