[Discuss] Fwd: Hey FCC, Don't Lock Down Our Wi-Fi Routers | WIRED

[Rich Pieri]

On 11/8/2015 9:15 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> market.  In that market, "Linksys by Cisco" was (as far as I know) the
> bulk of their offerings and Linux was common on those devices.  More

Linux was only on the WRT54G series. All other Linksys home routers ship 
with VxWorks. Actually, even the WRT54GL ships with VxWorks, now, and 
installing dd-wrt or OpenWrt or whatever voids the warranty.

> As for Netgear, at least some of their ReadyNAS product line
> apparently use Linux and this web page of source code for firmware for
> various Netgear products shows many products using GPLed (usually?
> linux) software:

Again, these are exceptions. The vast majority of Netgear's consumer 
products have no GPL code in them.

> http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2649/~/netgear-open-source-code-for-programmers-%28gpl%29
>
> Since neither one of us has defined "frequently" or "rare exception",
> I suppose we can both argue that we are right.   I would willingly

Linksys (by Cisco) has had one consumer router series with Linux. 
Netgear has had one (that I'm aware of) consumer router with Linux. 
Linksys currently lists 23 home wireless routers and Netgear currently 
lists 30 home wireless routers on their respective web sites. I'd say 
two devices out of more than 50 a pretty definitive meaning of "rare 
exception".

> Fine with this.   Time to market/ability to use the cheapest chips as
> fast as possible for
> SOHO products is certainly a reason to not use OpenWRT.   But I don't
> see that as having anything to do with OpenWRT being GPLed.

Lots of reasons that I've previously enumerated but here's another one: 
you can't turn a profit trying to sell GPL software.

-- 
Rich P.