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other devices that are based on Atheros is that they usually have
better performance with stock firmware. Also killer feature for some
wifi applications is TDMA protocol, which Ubiquiti, Mikrotik and other
device manufacturers support but OpenWrt doesn't support (but this is
completely different topic).

I knew that Atheros contributed to open source drivers, but there are
lots of reviews and benchmarks that show how much performance
difference there is between some (not all) devices when running
OpenWrt.

Our brains are wired for comparison, so they automatically attribute
labels like "bad", "worse", "slower", "not as good as original" when
using OpenWrt - I have seen this too many times on forums to give you
few specific links to discussions, just dive into forums and you will
see this for yourselves.

I understand some reasons for part of performance hit and I can live
with that. But I also know that performance could be improved because
companies that produce open source drivers don't have best possible
OpenWrt performance as their top priority. Top managers in most
companies don't believe that having best possible performance in
OpenWrt (and allocating enough engineer hours for that task) will make
them more money. Simple as that.

In contrast to this - other companies like Linksys, Mikrotik,
Ubiquiti, TPLink and others that have wifi products definitely give
top priority to how much performance they can sqeeze out of their
devices, and allocate enough engineer hours to make their performance
as fast as possible. Unfortunately they value their closed source
driver.

Can anyone explain to me how NDAs come into this? Because I remember
one discussions with Mikrotik developer who said that they can't
release their Atheros driver that they developed as open source
because they signed NDA with Atheros?

Is Atheros giving some "secret" and proprietary information to
companies that sign NDA with them? If this is true then we will never
have as fast performance as companies that sign NDAs.

v.
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