[OpenWrt-Devel] Why OpenWrt sucks?

Tue Mar 10 17:33:09 EDT 2015

Hi Gergely,

I'm just curious to know what makes you be "pretty sure" that many 
vendors will start doing this in the future and overcome the possible 
legal or political issues they may have to do that ? Marvel was one of 
the worst cases I've ever seen here and I have no much idea what made 
them to release it (a miracle maybe?). Unless you were referring to "in 
the future" as next century I don't see that happening that soon.

Other than that I fully agree OpenWrt is great, well developed and 
maintained.

Best,

On 10/03/2015 17:26, Gergely Kiss wrote:
> Hi Valent,
>
> first of all, I strongly disagree with people claiming that OpenWrt 
> sucks because it doesn't. For me it rather looks like a 
> well-maintained, rapidly improving project with a great number of 
> actively supported hardware and quite a few people contributing to the 
> project regularly. I can see dozens of patches published every day not 
> only by the core devs but by many contributors which is a great thing 
> and indicates that many people are trying to make OpenWrt *even *better.
>
> I must mention you had a point that made me smile - it's about being a 
> miracle that openwrt works as good as it does. This reminded me to the 
> DNS system. As we all know, it was never developed with a concept of 
> creating a complex network service to be used in a worldwide network 
> but more like as a simple "phonebook" for companies, schools and other 
> small, autonomous institutions to avoid the need to remember IP 
> addresses. Now, DNS is used worldwide by thousands of entities and is 
> probably one of the oldest protocols still actively used on the 
> internet and it still works pretty good despite its age. Miracles do 
> happen sometimes and that's what makes our lives brighter. :)
>
> Anyway, as far as I can see, more and more manufacturers (including 
> wireless chip vendors) realize the benefits of open source and release 
> their driver codes to the open source community. I clearly remember 
> seeing some driver sources posted on this list directly by Marvell and 
> I'm pretty sure that many other vendors will start doing so in the 
> future. I think the reason why most vendors still haven't published 
> their drivers is more like legal issues rather than technical or 
> "political" ones. They have to meet regulatory requirements and 
> respect the copyright of other people's work. Even if they would feel 
> inclined to release their driver, they can't do so because of 
> licensing issues.
>
> For people complaining about OpenWrt, I would simply tell them that 
> first of all, it's provided for free for everyone in the world so stop 
> complaining. Also, being an open source project, it's always open for 
> contributions. Everyone has the possibility to share ideas or 
> implement features making OpenWrt a more stable, more robust and more 
> versatile piece of software.
>
> My fifty cents was to create a port of Seafile for OpenWrt - I'm using 
> it myself at home and I'm very happy to see it running on my router 
> with a USB HDD attached rather than running an additional home server 
> 24/7 consuming more power and taking up more room in my flat. At the 
> same time, I'm happy to provide the same ability to other people 
> because that's how it's meant to be.
>
> Do you think OpenWrt sucks? Then stop complaining and do something to 
> make it better. It's that simple.
>
> Cheers,
> Gergely
>
> On 9 March 2015 at 21:02, valent.turkovic at gmail.com 
> <mailto:valent.turkovic at gmail.com> <valent.turkovic at gmail.com 
> <mailto:valent.turkovic at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi all,
>     I see this or similar question of forums all the time and I have
>     answered it few times. I suggest we open a wiki page and contribute an
>     answer.
>
>     Here is how I usually reply to similar questions, please give your
>     comments in your replies:
>
>
>     Why it OpenWrt slower than stock firmware? I can help by shining a bit
>     of light onto this subject. I'm developing custom firwmares based on
>     OpenWrt but I'm not OpenWrt developer, still as I have few years of
>     experience with OpenWrt I can explain why sometimes performance sucks
>     or there are some issues and bugs.
>
>     OpenWrt has three main parts; linux kernel, software packages and
>     wireless drivers. OpenWrt developers work on all of them. Consider the
>     amount of code this is, and consider that all work is done by a
>     handful of OpenWrt developers. If you work in software industry you
>     know many people big companies hire to work on much smaller projects.
>     So be thankful it works as good as it does, it is actually a miracle
>     that it works as good as it does
>
>     Main issue is that wifi chip manufacturers don't offer open source
>     wifi drivers. If Atheros and Broadcom understood Open source as Intel
>     does then you would get absolutely top speed and reliability from
>     OpenWrt wifi drivers. You don't get top notch performance with OpenWrt
>     because Atheros and Broadcom are choosing not release quality open
>     source drivers.
>
>     Linux, BSDx and OpenWrt developers can only use other means to get
>     wifi devices to work, usually reverse engineering, and without support
>     from wifi chip companies it is not easy to support all features, get
>     awesome performance and stability.
>
>     This is a long way of saying, that if performance sucks on OpenWrt you
>     should blame Atheros and Broadcom for not giving you (OpenWrt
>     community) high quality open source drivers!
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>
>
>
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