Hello, you probably all know what OpenWRT is

nbd's one of the main developers (Felix Fietkau)

He's here to tell you about the last 10 years of OpenWRT

Felix: Yes, thank you.
<i>applause</i>

The OpenWRT project was started a bit over 10 years ago

I'd like to take this opportunity to reflect back on

where the whole project came from

and how much it has changed and evolved over time,

based on the progress we have made

So first I'd like to tell you a bit about what happened in the early days

As many of you know and as the name OpenWRT
still implies

it started out pretty much as a firmware for the old WRT54G

The effort to create this firmware started when

basically it was discovered that this device, using a Broadcom chip,

was using Linux as its base operating system

initially it was a pretty huge GPL violation

because Linksys didn't release 
any source code for the device

but that of course didn't stop interested people from trying to hack it by looking into the inner workings of the firmware

discovering the limitations of it,

then starting to create a replacement for that firmware

and this was done in the early days based on the uclibc buildroot

which was a pretty small and flexible 
environment to quickly bring up code 
for a new target

and uclibc had the advantage of being much smaller than glibc which I think the initial device used

it started out by basically taking the Linksys GPL tarball once it was released

which only happened because many people, many of were members of the Linux kernel community

actively fought for the source code being released

and there was a lot of GPL compliance engineering involved in that effort as well