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canopic jug writes:

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

Original Submission