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Does anyone knows why Wi-Fi routers vendors keep writing (and maintaining for a short period) own firmware which in most cases has lower quality than OpenWRT wh
by citrin_ru 3y ago
Does anyone knows why Wi-Fi routers vendors keep writing (and maintaining for a short period) own firmware which in most cases has lower quality than OpenWRT when they can use OpenWRT and save money?
- alibert 3y agoActually, there is a large number of manufacturers using OpenWrt as a baseline for their firmware. Unfortunately, these are often outdated version of a forked OpenWrt with heavy modifications to include firmware blob for hardware acceleration and such.
- pinebox 3y agoBecause router vendors need some kind of "secret sauce" in order to keep selling routers, otherwise the whole thing becomes a commodity you can buy from anywhere. This is also why OpenWRT is unable to utilize all the features on a lot of routers: The closed source firmware and software pieces needed to do so have yet to be deciphered.
- citrin_ru 3y agoVendors can ship OpenWRT + closed source drivers. Anyway they use Linux kernel (yet to see a closed source BSD router; PfSense is occasionally used but its open source) relying on GPL exceptions allowing to use closed source drivers (and firmware blobs).