5 ms·

As an OpenWRT user it's a little worrying to find that many of the developers have left the project. Do you have any more info on why this happened?

the_rara_avis 10y ago
This seems to be pretty comprehensive: https://lwn.net/Articles/686767/ https://lwn.net/Articles/686767/
zhan_eg 10y ago
There was a pretty detailed discussion on HN on the split [0] I personally hope that the situation won't become as [1]. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11624374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11624374 [1] - https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- alimbada 10y ago
  Sure, having competing standards isn't always a good thing but we're not talking about a standard here. It's a new router firmware distribution and I think having more of them is a good thing as it gives people more choice. The major problem that I do see here is that LEDE has been forked from OpenWRT, but has nowhere near the level of device support that OpenWRT has. I have a TP-Link WDR4300 which I bought specifically because it was one of the routers which are highly compatible with OpenWRT. However, LEDE doesn't list this router amongst its supported devices (though there are newer WDRXXXX devices listed).
  - wtallis 10y ago
    > However, LEDE doesn't list this router amongst its supported devices (though there are newer WDRXXXX devices listed). What list are you looking at? LEDE does builds for the WDR4300, and given that it's an ath9k router, it is and will continue to be very well supported. The only caveat is that I don't know whether they've added the necessary signature to allow the firmware to be accepted as a valid upgrade by recent TP-Link stock firmware, but once any third-party firmware is installed, there's definitely no barrier to upgrading to LEDE.
    - alimbada 10y ago
      I was looking at this page: https://lede-project.org/toh/views/toh_available_864 https://lede-project.org/toh/views/toh_available_864 But I see now that my device is listed under the "non-ideal" table of hardware page.
TwoNineFive 10y ago
All of the links here on the issue are good. My personal take on the split is like this: First off, OpenWRT as a project was very sick before the split. There was development going on with core stuff and bug fixes, but a lot of things were not getting done: Documentation, user-oriented outreach (forum, end-user help, new-dev help, etc), security response was a joke, and other many other issues. Some of the old core devs went AWOL and were really hard to reach and rarely made new commits or worked on the project, but they still had the keys to servers, DNS, and similar stuff. Then one of the big dev servers over in Europe started going offline, and nobody knew why. Infrastructure like the user-forums, DNS, the bug tracker, and git/svn all would go down for HOURS or DAYS. People tried to reach out to the missing devs and got no reply... for DAYS. That really kicked things off. People already were not happy with how the current set of project maintainers were running things. There were too few people with the keys to the kingdom and then when stuff broke, nobody was around to fix it. The old devs are basically holding the name of the project hostage and preventing future progress. So people forked and that's that. The new LEDE Project has a lot of problems. I'm not a fan of how they have failed to scope out the project properly, but I think it's a better situation than the old OpenWRT project, which was dying a slow death. At least the new project has a chance at life instead of being smothered by the old devs who refused to share the keys to the kingdom with the active developers.

the_rara_avis 10y ago

This seems to be pretty comprehensive: https://lwn.net/Articles/686767/ https://lwn.net/Articles/686767/

zhan_eg 10y ago

There was a pretty detailed discussion on HN on the split [0] I personally hope that the situation won't become as [1]. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11624374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11624374 [1] - https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

alimbada 10y ago
Sure, having competing standards isn't always a good thing but we're not talking about a standard here. It's a new router firmware distribution and I think having more of them is a good thing as it gives people more choice. The major problem that I do see here is that LEDE has been forked from OpenWRT, but has nowhere near the level of device support that OpenWRT has. I have a TP-Link WDR4300 which I bought specifically because it was one of the routers which are highly compatible with OpenWRT. However, LEDE doesn't list this router amongst its supported devices (though there are newer WDRXXXX devices listed).
- wtallis 10y ago
  > However, LEDE doesn't list this router amongst its supported devices (though there are newer WDRXXXX devices listed). What list are you looking at? LEDE does builds for the WDR4300, and given that it's an ath9k router, it is and will continue to be very well supported. The only caveat is that I don't know whether they've added the necessary signature to allow the firmware to be accepted as a valid upgrade by recent TP-Link stock firmware, but once any third-party firmware is installed, there's definitely no barrier to upgrading to LEDE.
  - alimbada 10y ago
    I was looking at this page: https://lede-project.org/toh/views/toh_available_864 https://lede-project.org/toh/views/toh_available_864 But I see now that my device is listed under the "non-ideal" table of hardware page.

TwoNineFive 10y ago

All of the links here on the issue are good. My personal take on the split is like this: First off, OpenWRT as a project was very sick before the split. There was development going on with core stuff and bug fixes, but a lot of things were not getting done: Documentation, user-oriented outreach (forum, end-user help, new-dev help, etc), security response was a joke, and other many other issues. Some of the old core devs went AWOL and were really hard to reach and rarely made new commits or worked on the project, but they still had the keys to servers, DNS, and similar stuff. Then one of the big dev servers over in Europe started going offline, and nobody knew why. Infrastructure like the user-forums, DNS, the bug tracker, and git/svn all would go down for HOURS or DAYS. People tried to reach out to the missing devs and got no reply... for DAYS. That really kicked things off. People already were not happy with how the current set of project maintainers were running things. There were too few people with the keys to the kingdom and then when stuff broke, nobody was around to fix it. The old devs are basically holding the name of the project hostage and preventing future progress. So people forked and that's that. The new LEDE Project has a lot of problems. I'm not a fan of how they have failed to scope out the project properly, but I think it's a better situation than the old OpenWRT project, which was dying a slow death. At least the new project has a chance at life instead of being smothered by the old devs who refused to share the keys to the kingdom with the active developers.