Interesting story! If I recall correctly, the reason why those routers became open enough for third party firmware to be "easily" implementable on them was because Linksys had used some GPL licensed code on them and later ended up releasing the original firmware under outside pressure.
> On Mar 9, 2023, at 11:07, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <[email protected]> wrote: > > | From: Alex Kink via talk <[email protected]> > > | I'm sure there are more, but Linksys recently released a spiritual > successor to the WRT54GL, the router that gave a boost to the development of > the 3rd party router OSes (ddwrt, openwrt, tomato). Ability to install open > source OSes is even in the marketing material of this new router. > | > | > https://www.linksys.com/ca/wrt3200acm-ac3200-mu-mimo-gigabit-wi-fi-router/WRT3200ACM-CA.html > > I have earlier successors. They are OK. But Linksys didn't go the > whole way making things easy for OpenWRT. > > Historically Linksys has been hostile to open source. Unfortunately, > that's true of most of the SoC vendors too. > > Annecdote: > > I was a contributor to FreeS/WAN IPSec software for Linux. > > Linksys released a VPN router with FreeS/WAN. Without telling us and > without credit (pertectly legal). They also released it without > source (a violation of the license). I knew that it was my code > because the manual described a feature that was only implemented in > FreeS/WAN. > > I bought one of those routers and found that the feature was disabled. > But I really wanted to use it. > > So I requested the source code from them. They ignored my request. > > Eventually they released the source. But not in a buildable form. By > that time the product was dead. The hardware never worked reliably > for the users. (I never actually tried it because it wasn't going to > be useful to me without improved firmware.) > --- > Post to this mailing list [email protected] > Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk --- Post to this mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
