Linux Foundation

[David Lang]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2017, John Crispin wrote:

> neutral, i see many bad things attached to the owrt brand, however i
> find that the lede name is not very good either and has the taste of the
> reboot attached to it.
>
> to me it looks like the vote will result in the vast majority saying
> that they want to remerge and dont care about the name. only a small
> fraction will be biased towards a name. this would make the remerge not
> happen and the discussion circle around the colour of the flag. this in
> turn undermines the whole purpose of why the reboot happened and the
> same crowd that in the past had problems finding common ground would be
> at it again. i'd rather put the focus on the rules and changes to the
> modus operandi being put in place
>
> i can live with adopting the owrt again as this was never part of the
> reason of the reboot. remerging and adopting the rules has a far higher
> priority to me and the name is only a small detail that is blocking the
> remerge.

For the last several years I have run the wireless network at the Scale 
conference, I did not participate this year and was talking to the guys who ran 
the network instead. None of them had even heard of LEDE, they were just puzzled 
as to why development of OpenWRT seemed slow over the last year. This is with 
people involved in promoting opensource who are familar enough with OpenWRT to 
be ready to deploy over a hundred APs on it for production use.

There are a LOT of resources out there on the web that list DD-WRT and OpenWRT, 
but will never list LEDE.

So there is always[1] going to need to be a web presense for OpwnWRT and an 
explination that the project has changed it's name.

I don't think that many people out there associate OpenWRT/DD-WRT with any 
particular product line, it's very well known to be used on a wide range of 
devices.

There seem to be a few people to who the name invokes bad memories. Are those 
bad memories ones that can never be replaced by good ones if the future project 
uses that name? Is there really that much bad blood that has been developed?


LibreOffice is still suffering from the OpenOffice name issue, it's getting less 
of a problem, but it's an indication that changing a popular name is something 
that takes many years (if not decades) to fully recover from.


If the name of the combined project does change, there is going to be the 
ongoing question "why did the name change?" which will result is (usually bad) 
explinations that dredge up the problems of the past.


As a user/advocate, I think there is a lot of value in the combined project 
using the OpenWRT name

David Lang

[1] well, not always, but for at least a decade, which is close enough to 
always.