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Ernie Smith, an editor at Tedium, has explored the historical events which led to the Linksys WRT54G router becoming so popular. It rose to fame because of an undocumented feature which, once discovered, led to great interest in the wider ICT [*] community.
Mikas caught something interesting, but something that shouldn’t have been there. This was an oversight on the part of Cisco, which got an unhappy surprise about a popular product sold by its recent acquisition just months after its release. Essentially, what happened was that one of their suppliers apparently got a hold of Linux-based firmware, used it in the chips supplied to the company by Broadcom, and failed to inform Linksys, which then sold the software off to Cisco.
In a 2005 column for Linux Insider, Heather J. Meeker, a lawyer focused on issues of intellectual property and open-source software, wrote that this would have been a tall order for Cisco to figure out on its own:
The first takeaway from this case is the difficulty of doing enough diligence on software development in an age of vertical disintegration. Cisco knew nothing about the problem, despite presumably having done intellectual property diligence on Linksys before it bought the company. But to confound matters, Linksys probably knew nothing of the problem either, because Linksys has been buying the culprit chipsets from Broadcom, and Broadcom also presumably did not know, because it in turn outsourced the development of the firmware for the chipset to an overseas developer.
To discover the problem, Cisco would have had to do diligence through three levels of product integration, which anyone in the mergers and acquisitions trade can tell you is just about impossible. This was not sloppiness or carelessness—it was opaqueness.
Bruce Perens, a venture capitalist, open-source advocate, and former project leader for the Debian Linux distribution, told LinuxDevices that Cisco wasn’t to blame for what happened, but still faced compliance issues with the open-source license.
“Subcontractors in general are not doing enough to inform clients about their obligations under the GPL,” Perens said. (He added that, despite offering to help Cisco, they were not getting back to him.)
Nonetheless, the info about the router with the open-source firmware was out there, and Mikas’ post quickly gained attention in the enthusiast community. A Slashdot post could already see the possibilities: “This could be interesting: it might provide the possibility of building an uber-cool accesspoint firmware with IPsec and native ipv6 support etc etc, using this information!”
[*] ICT: Information and Communications Technology.
OpenWRT has become the way forward. Which firmware do Soylentils have installed on their routers?
Previously:
(2016) Follow Up: Linksys WRT Routers Won't Block Open Source Firmware, Despite FCC Rules
(2016) Linksys to Provide DD-WRT Support for All Current WRT Routers
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @05:40PM (9 children)
Should make it clear the "problem" is sale and distribution of GPL-licensed linux firmware (or is it?)
I still use that router with tomato.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday January 20 2021, @06:33PM (7 children)
The "problem" for Cisco was a win for the consumer.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by EEMac on Wednesday January 20 2021, @06:49PM (6 children)
This really makes it clear where a company's priorities lie.
"Releasing an open-source compatible router gave us a highly-profitable product that sold for years longer than similar models. A small but influential group of technically-competent people will use nothing but our product, ever, until the technology is completely obsolete."
"Whoops! We better not do that again!"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday January 20 2021, @08:26PM (4 children)
THIS! If I could mod this up beyond 5, I would. This isn't the first time either.
IBM accidentally created a ubiquitous open personal computer that took the world by storm. They were so busy trying to cram the genie back in the bottle they missed out on the lion's share of the reward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @08:29PM
Suited Whores
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @08:31PM (1 child)
Yep, IBM tried to force "PS/2 it" with the proprietary microchannel bus - FAIL!
(Score: 4, Funny) by sjames on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:16PM
I always wondered why they thought I would be willing to pay that much for half of a Personal System.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:28PM
A large share of the world's companies put more effort into making their products worse than into making them better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tokolosh on Wednesday January 20 2021, @10:21PM
Indeed. And then Sveasoft tried to hijack the firmware (https://lwn.net/Articles/178550/) but luckily that got knocked on the head after a nasty squabble. Broadcom STILL refuses to open-source its wireless drivers, showing that people never learn. I am certain that Broadcom could do wonders for router capabilities and security, plus their reputation and profitability, if they would stop trying to be IBM/Cisco/Apple. We can blame lawyers, MBAs and marketing.
My WRT54G happily runs FreshTomato, with IPv6 and a host of features. The maintainers of the firmware simply ask that you voluntarily throw them some $.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 20 2021, @07:57PM
I still use that exact router with DD-WRT. Mind you, it's currently only acting as a wired-to-wireless bridge for a piece of kit I can't be arsed to replace the wireless card in or to run cable when I won't be in this house another two months. It's been in near continuous service since roughly 2004 too, so kudos on quality engineering, Linksys.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 21 2021, @02:56AM (2 children)
A long time ago, I bought a WRT54G. It was horrible. Pings on the LAN took 10 seconds. Couldn't do any web surfing at all, thanks to such long delays causing timeouts. Trying to figure out what was wrong, I eventually discovered that they had just moved from revision 4, which was the good version, with Linux under the hood, to revision 5 which was completely different internally, with VxWorks and half the RAM. I took it back for a full refund 2 days later.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fishybell on Thursday January 21 2021, @03:57AM (1 child)
Oh how I wish all manufacturers changed product numbers, even minor version numbers, when they sell something with entirely different internals as the same product. To me it's outright false advertising.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 21 2021, @01:15PM
Yes, I was plenty unhappy over being tricked. Imagine the embarrassment had I recommended that device to a customer or employer. Alas, it's far from the only commodity router that's so broken as to be worthless.
Shortly after my experience, Linksys restored the old one under a slightly different model number, WRT54GL. The 'L' was for "Linux".
(Score: 3, Informative) by chewbacon on Thursday January 21 2021, @01:56PM
I build all of my images to tweak wifi drivers. I also run LXC on them with an Ubuntu install for Pihole; another reason custom builds are necessary. I also have a travel router on OpenWRT for work that tunnels back home automatically so I can access the LAN... that part was really just for fun and boredom. My favorite device right now is the WRT1200AC, which carries a little more memory, yet less storage, than its "big" brother the 1900. OpenWRT is behind on Wifi6 at the moment, but the world will see how that goes as Wifi6 isn't priced for prime time yet.
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Friday January 22 2021, @11:29PM
I brought my WRT54GL out of retirement last year for a coworker who needed a router. I'd put Tomato on it long ago...just had to reconfigure it so it no longer had my network setup on it.
Nowadays at home, I'm using an Asus RT-AC56U. I've considered throwing alternative firmware on it, but factory firmware has worked well enough for me that I've not really needed to replace it.