I made a blog post about why the situation is worse than a general lock down:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/blog
Linksys is also causing problems with there "open source" wifi router, but
now TP-Link is going to be doing something similar because of FCC action. The
media is making this out to be a good thing totally missing out on the fact
it undermines our ability to get critical pieces of code (wifi firmwares).
The wifi firmwares now contain critical components and without them we won't
be able to do things like add proper mesh networking support. The benefits of
flashing a router with third party firmwares will be wiped away. Basically if
users can flash firmwares and only wifi firmwares are locked then the release
of code for the wifi firmwares will result in these companies products
becoming non-compliant. No chipset company is going to risk that. It was
already almost certainly going to be an issue because users would not be able
to flash third party router firmwares period so what good would releasing the
wifi firmware source code be? Now doing so would certainly put companies into
non-compliance should this code get released.
