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. applause
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