alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 2:52 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377)
In reply to: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation? by Del-
Parent article: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

[...] The router firmwares were opened up, and projects like DD-WRT and OpenWRT exists because of the litigation. Only because of the GPL enforcement, no other reason, period. It is the sole reason why I have been able to use free firmwares on all my routers the last decade.

Wrong. You could have had just as free a firmware in a larger white box PC with multiple NICs. Performance/Price and Size and Power metrics may have been lessened, but- the idea that *WRT is "the sole reason why you have been able to use free firmwares on all your routers in the last decade" is patently false. 100% dead wrong. You need to reevaluate all the conclusions you have derived from that premise.

Copyleft is designed specifically to avoid forking, it is specifically crafted to stimulate collaboration and community building.

I wish I believed you were wrong about this, but if you or someone else feel like providing the wikipedia style citation, I'd like to click it. I always considered the freedom to fork, and resulting ecosystem value to be a major selling point of Copyleft, not what it was designed to avoid (though yes, I get the avoidance sentiment from many in the field, but I may have been in denial that it was actually part of the initial specific design).

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 2:57 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (28 responses)

My router isn't a white-box PC, and as such the only reason I can run free software on it is because of GPL enforcement.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 3:52 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (27 responses)

please don't help confuse others that I'm suggesting GPL enforcement in general, or in the *WRT related cases is a bad thing. But it in no way is any kind of path towards ensuring that all small low priced mass produced routers have a FOSS firmware(/OS) option. One can these days (but much less so 7 years ago) use a raspberry pi or beaglebone or many others, combined with a bog standard debian install to achieve the "non-white-box PC router with free firmware" situation. I'm trying to discredit the assertion that these specific GPL enforcement cases should be viewed as having a causal relationship with the option of having a router with a free firmware. Sure, in the specific cases of a subset of models of aforementioned class of routers, it- I'll take from context of the discussion- presumably helped a lot. But if those companies had never made those violations, had never even chose to exist, the option for free firmware routers would never have been absent. Again, you may have had to pay a little more, or supply more electricity or space, the usual engineering tradeoffs. But the ability to buy many varieties of hardware of varying capability and varying prices, with just as free a firmware was always there. Never went away.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 4:10 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (26 responses)

There's no level of equivalence between the situations you're describing. A Raspberry Pi is an incredibly inappropriate choice for a router - you'd be trying to drive gigabit ethernet over a USB implementation that can handle nowhere near that. On the Beaglebone side, you're looking at the X15 before you get gigabit and enough USB to drive a second gigabit interface, and then you're also looking at $249.

Could you build a router with free software without the source that we obtained as a result of GPL enforcement actions? Sure. Would you be able to install free software on the routers that people actually buy? No. And as such it's just not a relevant observation. GPL enforcement is the only reason that a large number of people are able to run free software on their routers. The alternative wasn't them spending more money to obtain hardware that was less well suited to the problem, the alternative was them running non-free software.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 4:53 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (4 responses)

Could you build a router with free software without the source that we obtained as a result of GPL enforcement actions? Sure. Would you be able to install free software on the routers that people actually buy? No.

Respectfully I disagree. I believe you and others are almost emotionally reacting to different but similar historical battles in the FOSS universe. In this situation, I believe it was all but inevitable (snowden being the nail in the coffin) that *eventually* (maybe 10 years later than we'd all like) the answer above would have been Yes. You stated your belief it would be No. We've come to different conclusions. I'll try to remember to think back to the question after seeing another decade or two of this tech evolution period. I'm willing to admit I could be wrong and you could be right.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 6:21 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

The only reason that I can install free software on the router in my home is because of GPL enforcement actions. If I'd bought different hardware, that might not be the case. In 10 years, that might not be the case. But that's the reality of the now. Enforcement brought us to this place, and we're better off as a result.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 6:27 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

we both agree that gpl licence enforcement is good, and that it's better that the existing routers that work with *wrt have that option.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 23, 2016 0:43 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

If there hadn't been the GPL enforcement, the routers would probably not be running an OpenWRT/DD-WRT fork to begin with, and as a result would probably be FAR harder to get Linux running on.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 23, 2016 1:52 UTC (Sat) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

and clarifying I'll highlight that by "the routers" you mean a pretty small subset of the available router options people had. Where amongst those were plenty of options that were FAR easier to get *wrt/*nix running on than it is currently to get on say the third least supported routers by *wrt. This line of thinking matters in the big picture. It would be very easy for a lay person to catch part of the discussions and think that without *wrt they could not have been running a fully free linux based router. Again, perhaps with lower performance, bigger size, more electricity consumption. But plenty capable of satisfying at least 90% of the users of low priced routers that *wrt supports. I.e. even though gigabit ports exist, you can get a lot done one the internet from a house or an apartment with 10 or 100baseT.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 5:34 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Just as a note, I built a custom router for a broken Ethernet-connected devices with the help of a MIPS-based board from RouterBoard. In 2006 and for $50 apiece. They don't sell it anymore, but this one is the closest: http://routerboard.com/RB450

Later I used a more expensive ($75, I believe) board to build a wireless bridge for them. Now an even better board can be bought for $50: http://routerboard.com/RB911G-5HPnD

They provide full kernel source code and device specifications.

> GPL enforcement is the only reason that a large number of people are able to run free software on their routers.
From my experience, DD/OpenWRT never worked for me on a random device that I bought unless I checked the forums first and then ordered an exact model that got good reviews.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 22, 2016 6:21 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

If you're willing to put in the time and effort, yes, you can certainly build something for a more reasonable price. On the other hand, I paid $3 for the router sitting under my desk at the moment, and then I just uploaded new firmware via the web UI in order to get to the same point. It's certainly not some magical utopia where every router is supported, and it's unlikely that we'll ever get to that point, but a huge number of consumer routers can run entirely free software and people do take opportunistic advantage of that.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 25, 2016 14:14 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (18 responses)

An odroid C1 can easily get 350MiB/s out of its Ethernet ports, and it's the slow model with transmit buffers too small to allow the link to be saturated.

(I still wouldn't use it as a wifi router, though -- all the odroids run ancient kernels and never allow upgrading and are more or less intended to be thrown away after a couple of years: fine for a home cinema box or experimental toy wossname, but my routers are network-critical and I expect them to last much longer. Obviously it would be totally useless to talk e.g. ADSL without additional hardware.)

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 25, 2016 15:04 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (17 responses)

People on these parts just spend equal or less money than rpi costs ( which has an real end user cost around $90 not the advertised $35 ) on Microtik[1] RouterBOARD[2] and RouterOS ( which is linux based ) to get the most "bang for the router buck with updates" ( or skip the routeros and run their own linux on routerboard ) instead of trying gluing together a semi functional router out of the rpi ( or similar devices ).

1. http://www.mikrotik.com/
2. http://routerboard.com/

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 26, 2016 10:47 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (16 responses)

Looking at my 'next hardware when the Soekris dies' list, that's on there already. Unfortunately hardware with more than a couple of Ethernet ports is *expensive*, particularly if you also want something that's fanless...

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 27, 2016 11:08 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

>Unfortunately hardware with more than a couple of Ethernet ports is *expensive*, particularly if you also want something that's fanless

Well how may ethernet ports do you need, and what's the threshold for 'too expensive'? I'm guessing something like £150+VAT is probably over it:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~FX5624 (bizarre that only two of the ports are gigabit, though in many scenarios that wouldn't be a showstopper)
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~JNF9HG-2930

Otherwise maybe a mini-itx board with 2 ethernet ports and a PCI-E slot to add more would be the way forward, like this:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~N3050N-D3H

alternatives exist

Posted May 10, 2016 21:16 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, stuff just like that from the mini-itx store is probably what I'll be looking at. The only problem with that sort of thing is what to do if I need console access; Soekris has a serial console, but attaching a VGA screen is likely to be a nightmare given where the box is located. Maybe there's such a thing as a VGA over USB adapter, but I've never heard of any :)

alternatives exist

Posted May 10, 2016 21:32 UTC (Tue) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link] (1 responses)

Something like http://plugable.com/products/uga-3000 you mean?

alternatives exist

Posted May 11, 2016 22:25 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Something like that, only without the "Not supported for Mac or Linux at this time." caveat.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 27, 2016 21:36 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (11 responses)

http://routerboard.com/RB450 ?

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 27, 2016 22:23 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

This is the 21 century so you want the Gig model [1] which also has more RAM, faster CPU and a microSD card slot for file storage.

The hex [2] is also fanless ( and cheaper ).

Perhaps LWN writers should just buy one of these devices and do a review on the routerOS that comes with it which should enlighten most individuals that you better of ( time and price wize ) just buying one of those device with routerOS and it's subscriptions rather than wasting your time and effort trying to hack some remotely function network device out of RPI, Odroid or the likes.

1. http://routerboard.com/RB450G ( $59.95 )
2. http://routerboard.com/RB750Gr2 ( $99.00 )

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 27, 2016 22:40 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

I accidental swapped the price points there

Here is an $18 enclosure for the RB450G.

1. http://www.ispsupplies.com/categories/Indoor-Enclosures/M...

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 27, 2016 22:42 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

RouterOS itself is a fine product, but it's a commercial product. You get a basic license with the board and it's good enough for a simple access point and it's also surprisingly easy to lose your license by reflashing the device.

I have several RBs running regular vanilla Debian for MIPS and I've had no problems at all with it. Recovering from a bad installation is also easy, the board's bootloader has built-in netboot support and is accessible through UART, so you just need to set up a DHCP+TFTP to serve recovery image and select it during the boot.

It's pretty much the best router-type device I've ever worked with. Head and shoulders ahead of ARM-based crapware home routers.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 27, 2016 23:33 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (7 responses)

I've looked at their stuff in the past, but the fact that I can't put my own linux build on too much of their stuff has eliminated it for me.

There was someone working on doing this, but the work was being done under an NDA where he wasn't allowed to release the result and the company then got sticky about even renewing the NDA, let alone allowing the release of the result.

they got a bit of money from me, and burned me by their change in stance, so I'm not getting more of their stuff until they actually release stuff.

Since routerOS is linux based, they really should be doing so. And they really should update it (the last I read it was based on the 2.6 kernel)

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 0:29 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

You most definitely can run custom code on their boxes, you don't need anything really special. I think they are even supported by the mainline kernel now (quick check shows that there are indeed RB4xx support files in the kernel).

There are HOWTOs about running Debian on RBs, they are somewhat dated but still working.

There's also full OpenWRT support.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 0:45 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (5 responses)

"Since routerOS is linux based, they really should be doing so. And they really should update it (the last I read it was based on the 2.6 kernel)"

There are continues updates of the routerOS and these days it's based on the Linux 3.3.5 kernel.

The source code for it is available on request but I must say I have never tested requesting it from them ( or anyone else for that matter ) so I can't say how "functional" that process is from them but indeed it should be open but I guess they are one of those vendors that think they are doing something very special in their proprietary environment which other vendors are not doing when in fact in a nutshell they are all doing the same thing.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 1:31 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

I'll take another look. About a year ago when I last looked, things were rather dismal, at least for the crs125 switch I was looking at and what I was begin told by the guy trying to get openwrt working on it.

Their "What is RouterOS" pdf still claims that it's linux 2.6 based. I don't know if I'm glad that the document is so out of date or not :-)

The Openwrt table of hardware page isn't encouraging ( https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/crs125g ) but it wouldn't be the first time a page didn't get updated after things got working.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 9:41 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

This page is a little bit better: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb450g

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 15:26 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

If he's going to be playing with openwrt for fun he's probably better of just buying one of Turris ( which is based on openwrt ) devices.

1. https://omnia.turris.cz/en/

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 16:34 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

I should mention to readers that might have been unaware of turris and it's campaign and have a higher budget to play with than what has been previously discussed here that they have up to May 5th to get the indigo campaign specific stuff.

Once that date has passed only products intended for future retail sale will remain available [1].

Note this is completely open project on a completely open hardware ( as it can be ) and people will be able to replace the turris openwrt with their own distribution if they so much want ( which alot of people will do including myself ) in fact the cz.nic guys already have given Andreas Färber ( suse/arm ) one of their prototype to experiment with to do just that and Andreas has already gotten opensuse running on it and shared the instruction how he did so with the opensuse community here [4] ( which should be enough to get other distribution and people started ).

Here are some couple of other links readers might find useful [3][4].

1. http://en.blog.nic.cz/2016/04/27/turris-omnia-campaign-en...
2. https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-arm/2016-03/msg00136....
3. https://github.com/CZ-NIC
4. https://www.turris.cz/en/

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 17:48 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I've got one on order.

I do a bit more than just playing with it for fun. I run the wireless network at the Scale conference, this year I deployed about 120 APs around the convention center.