> openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
Does it actually? AFAIK, there is no "specification" or "protocol", it's a cobbled together "platform" you run, with a bunch of integrations, but none of that is specified by openclaw itself. Happy to be corrected though, I only spent one weekend with openclaw before tearing it down.
> AFAIK, there is no "specification" or "protocol"
The protocol is english. You want your claw to check a hacker news comment and let you know when it gets a reply? You tell it "Check every 5 minutes if this comment has a reply", which then generates an english message to save and send to the agent each time, resulting in a browser tool invocation.
The claws live in a post-API world, where the API is english which turns into bash invocations or browser tool calls or such.
I've only just started to dive into it from the documentation side of things. They have ( maybe recently? ) started to create this Gateway Protocol https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/protocol to connect the stuff together.
It may be a "we are changing the wheels while driving" thing, but if enough people make nodes for openclaw it will become somewhat of a standard. And then we probably see 100 different claw offshots that all use the same nodes but with a different claw in the center
That's a communication protocol between openclaw server and clients authenticated to that server though, it's not a communication protocol between different openclaw servers, is it? More like defining a HTTP+JSON protocol between a web server and a browser side client application. It's not a "protocol defining how to interact with distributed nodes", again, unless I misunderstand something.
Yes, that's why I compared it to ROS. I didn't mean multiple openclaws communicating with each other but openclaw communicating with nodes ( which are self contained programs running on your desktop or phone providing capabilities like webbrowsing to the claw server )
> openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
When one talks about "distributed nodes" that usually means N nodes talking with each other, and being somewhat homogeneous between each other, unless the protocol temporarly can lift/lower some functionality.
You typically don't say "distributed nodes" when you're talking about a server<>client architecture, which seemingly is exactly how openclaw operates, both according to what I saw myself, and what you wrote in this comment.
Does it actually? AFAIK, there is no "specification" or "protocol", it's a cobbled together "platform" you run, with a bunch of integrations, but none of that is specified by openclaw itself. Happy to be corrected though, I only spent one weekend with openclaw before tearing it down.