[OpenWrt-Devel] Why OpenWrt sucks?

[John Clark]

On Mar 11, 2015, at 2:39 PM, Adam Kuklycz <adamk at mcservices.com.au> wrote:

> I think what everyone needs to just think and remember for a minute:
> 
> *  OpenWRT is built by the community and not by highly paid engineers
> *  OpenWRT is often far more feature rich than stock firmwares written for
> the devices supported
> *  OpenWRT is even used sometimes by hardware vendors as a baseline for
> their own firmwares


The issue of ‘poor performance’ in WIFI/802.11 is directly due to the lack of if, and the expense and protectiveness of the chip manufacturer.

In many cases where the application is not dependent on ‘inside’ information, the performance of the Open Source tool set is often superior
to whatever a closed similar offering may be from a software/hardware vendor.

This is because there may be far greater number of ‘eyes’ on the application internals in the Open Source world, than in a closed commercial
product.

To be sure, a closed app may have ‘hot line’ support… then again… one of the constant complaints is that the ‘hot line’ support is not worth it, even if given for free…

I definitely have found this true over the years, that the Open Source projects allow me to find ‘what the problem is’, and thence a work around.
Where as when I have been forced to use closed products, such as vxWorks in the olden days, days, weeks, months could go by for issues, that in some cases the ‘answer’ was that Windriver wasn’t going to ‘fix’ the problem at all. In fact, getting access to an ‘engineer’ came to require an act of god.

In that regard, OpenWRT is far ‘superior’ to most closed packages.

As for hardware advantage, in the case of Atheros, that often is in how much ‘improvement’ the hardware vendor makes over the Atheros supplied reference design.

In some cases the vendor design is a ‘Muntzed’ version of the reference. “Mad Man” Muntz was notorious in the early days of TV by buying a ‘quality’ TV, having his engineers reverse engineer the device, tossing parts or find ‘cheap’ equivalents, which just barely allowed the TV to work at all, and then sell the resulting designed TV at ‘discount’ prices.

That theme has not changed in these modern times.


John.
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