Sveasoft’s firmware development incorporated code from OpenWRT. But Ewing’s business practices began attracting criticism from open source advocates. Enter Sveasoft, a project spearheaded by one James Ewing, responsible for attracting more mainstream users to alternative router firmware with its releases named Satori, Alchemy, and Talisman. Although OpenWRT introduced a powerfully open platform to the WRT54G router, it has long been a project oriented toward advanced users, configured primarily through command-line access.īecause OpenWRT itself is an open source GPL-based project, other developers can build upon it, for example to wrap it with a user-friendly interface. One of the earliest projects to build on the open source Linksys codebase is OpenWRT. And in fact, DD-WRT is not the first descendant of the original Linksys code to court controversy. Because that firmware was licensed as open source software under the GPL, developers downloaded and built upon it. The DD-WRT software replaces the original (“stock”) firmware included by the manufacturer and provides many more features, some of which are usually available in only expensive enterprise-grade routers, such as bandwidth monitoring, hotspot management, client and bridge modes, and output power adjustment.ĭD-WRT is not alone among alternative firmware projects. Sveasoft, HyperWRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato all share a common family lineage with DD-WRT that traces back to the original Linksys firmware for its WRT54G V1 router. If all this sounds like some kind of gibberish, DD-WRT is software that you can load (“flash”) onto a compatible wireless router, such as many models in the Linksys WRT54G family. To some vocal critics, DD-WRT is betraying its open source roots, and possibly even violating the GPL-the GNU General Public License-under which the software is released. But the harshest accusations of all have little to do with DD-WRT’s performance and a lot to do with the project’s ethics. Some say that it still harbors many bugs, despite the time spent in development. Some say that DD-WRT is slow to evolve, with long delays between releases. With an estimated one million or more wireless routers running DD-WRT firmware, it may not be so surprising that-like anything popular-the free open source project has attracted its critics. To some vocal critics, DD-WRT, the open source firmware currently running on more than one million wireless routers, is betraying its open source roots and possibly even violating the General Public License under which the software is released.
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