OpenWrt vs Defense positions

[Dave Taht]

On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 6:24 AM Peter Naulls <peter at chocky.org> wrote:

> > Another impression I have, is that the OpenWrt project is very important for many yet under-resourced.
> > There are some important tasks that would help with the long-term maintenance (e.g. merging of the mtk_nand for > > Does anyone know how much contributions come from people working for companies in OpenWrt?
>> Who knows. I will say that OpenWrt has formed a large part of my career.  As
> measured by patches (which frankly, is something of a time-consuming hurdle), my
> contributions are very very small, but all my OpenWrt work has been under
> companies.

Embedded Linux was, until recently, my "career" since 1997 or so, when
I started working with the handhelds.org project, and later worked at
MontaVista. Very little of what I have done since 2003 was under
corporate aegis. CeroWrt, and the five years spent reworking the Linux
wifi stack in make-wifi-fast came out of my savings, mostly, with a
bit of support from comcast, nlnet, and gfiber. When I failed to get a
round of external funding to keep the project alive, after we heaved
the most core fq_codel bits over the wall, I gave up. There are still
bugs left over in that, hanging over my head, no-one else has been
able to solve.

The wifi industry as a whole took a major wrong turn that perhaps
wifi7 will get it out of, but I don´t know. There are so many other
problems in embedded linux today, not least of which is the failure to
keep up with mainline linux. Complexity collapse seems nigh!, and the
skills required to cross compile stuff seem to be fading. Of
particular irony for me persists in the initial joy I had felt upon
learning Starlink was using openwrt, only to find that even their most
recent product is leveraging... wait for it... LEDE, and so locked
down as to be impossible to upgrade.

Going back to the original subject of this thread, I would hope that
more cash spent on testing and securing openwrt would come from
*somewhere*.
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Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos