On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 9:09 AM Tomas Kuchta <[email protected]> wrote: > > I love these gl.inet routers - they are openWrt out of the box.
I just want to inject one caution here. A lot of the devices that are marketed as running OpenWrt out of the box, are actually running a vendor forked version of OpenWrt, often forked years ago, and never upstreamed. The implication of the claim is that you can just run "modern" OpenWrt at any time, but often that's not the case. And when people have trouble and come to the OpenWrt community for help, the community often can't help them because they aren't running the modern OpenWrt that the community has any control over. The most prominent example was when Linksys launched the WRT reboot, the WRT1900AC, announcing OpenWrt support (https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt1900ac). Over the years, this led to considerable gnashing of teeth, because the support burden got shifted from the vendor of the device to the volunteer community that had no coordination or, really, any knowledge of the platform the vendor had chosen. Ultimately, whatever support the community could provide was due to reverse engineering, and motivated individuals porting GPL dumps to modern OpenWrt. And, some vendors refuse to comply with the GPL and we don't even get the dumps. Many if not most consumer-of-the-shelf routers are running some version of OpenWrt or other, even if they aren't marketed as such. But the vendor rarely does the work to upstream that support, which means that whatever benefits you think you are getting with the OpenWrt support are not something you can practically realize. Some vendors are better than others and even the better vendors ebb and flow in their enthusiasm for coordination over time. In short, don't rely on vendor's implicit claims. Check with upstream OpenWrt to see whether you are actually getting with you think you are getting. -- Russell Senior [email protected]
