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By Nathan Willis
May 11, 2016
The OpenWrt project is perhaps the most widely known Linux-based distribution for home WiFi routers and access points; it was spawned from the source code of the now-famous Linksys WRT54G router more than 12 years ago. In early May, the OpenWrt user community was thrown into a fair amount of confusion when a group of core OpenWrt developersannounced that they were starting a spin-off (or, perhaps, a fork) of OpenWrt to be named the Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE). It was not entirely clear to the public why the split was taking place―and the fact that the LEDE announcement surprised a few other OpenWrt developers suggested trouble within the team.
The LEDE announcement was sent on May3 by Jo-Philipp Wich to both the OpenWrt development list and the new LEDE development list. It describes LEDE as " a reboot of the OpenWrt community " and as " a spin-off of the OpenWrt project " seeking to create an embedded-Linux development community " with a strong focus on transparency, collaboration and decentralisation. "
The rationale given for the reboot was that OpenWrt suffered from longstanding issues that could not be fixed from within―namely, regarding internal processes and policies. For instance, the announcement said, the number of developers is at an all-time low, but there is no process for on-boarding new developers (and, it seems, no process for granting commit access to new developers). The project infrastructure is unreliable (evidently, server outages over the past year have caused considerable strife within the project), the announcement said, but internal disagreements and single points of failure prevented fixing it. There is also a general lack of " communication, transparency and coordination " internally and from the project to the outside world. Finally, a few technical shortcomings were cited: inadequate testing, lack of regular builds, and poor stability and documentation.
The announcement goes on to describe how the LEDE reboot will address these issues. All communication channels will be made available for public consumption, decisions will be made by project-wide votes, the merge policy will be more relaxed, and so forth. A more detailed explanation of the new project's policies can be found on the rules page at the LEDE site. Among other specifics, it says that there will be only one class of committer (that is, no "core developer" group with additional privileges), that simple majority votes will settle decisions, and that any infrastructure managed by the project must have at least three operators with administrative access. On the LEDE mailing list, Hauke Mehrtens added that the project will make an effort to have patches sent upstream―a point on which OpenWrt has been criticized in the past, especially where the kernel is concerned.
In addition to Wich, the announcement was co-signed by OpenWrt contributors John Crispin, Daniel Golle, Felix Fietkau, Mehrtens, Matthias Schiffer, and Steven Barth. It ends with an invitation for others interested in participating to visit the LEDE site.
Reactions and questionsOne might presume that the LEDE organizers expected their announcement to be met with some mixture of positive and negative reactions. After all, a close reading of the criticisms of the OpenWrt project in the announcement suggests that there were some OpenWrt project members that the LEDE camp found difficult to work with (the "single points of failure" or "internal disagreements" that prevented infrastructure fixes, for instance).
And, indeed, there were negative responses. OpenWrt co-founder Mike Bakerresponded with some alarm, disagreeing with all of the LEDE announcement's conclusions and saying " phrases such as a 'reboot' are both vague and misleading and the LEDE project failed to identify its true nature. " Around the same time, someone disabled the @openwrt.org email aliases of those developers who signed the LEDE announcement; when Fietkauobjected, Bakerreplied that the accounts were " temporarily disabled " because " it's unclear if LEDE still represents OpenWrt ." Imre Kaloz, another core OpenWrt member,wrote that " the LEDE team created most of that [broken] status quo " in OpenWrt that it was now complaining about.But the majority of the responses on the OpenWrt list expressed confusion about the announcement. List members were not clear whether the LEDE team was going to continue contributing to OpenWrt or not, nor what theexact nature of the infrastructure and internal problems were that led to the split. Baker's initial response lamented the lack of public debate over the issues cited in the announcement: " We recognize the current OpenWrt project suffers from a number of issues ," but " we hoped we had an opportunity to discuss and attempt to fix " them. Baker concluded:
We would like to stress that we do want to have an open discussion and resolve matters at hand. Our goal is to work with all parties who can and want to contribute to OpenWrt, including the LEDE team.
In addition to the questions over the rationale of the new project, some list subscribers expressed confusion as to whether LEDE was targeting the same uses cases as OpenWrt, given the more generic-sounding name of the new project. Furthermore, a number of people, such as Roman Yeryomin,expressed confusion as to why the issues demanded the departure of the LEDE team, particularly given that, together, the LEDE group constituted a majority of the active core OpenWrt developers. Some list subscribers, like Michael Richardson, were even unclear on who would still be developing OpenWrt.
ClarificationsThe LEDE team made a few attempts to further clarify their position. In Fietkau's reply to Baker, he said that discussions about proposed changes within the OpenWrt project tended to quickly turn " toxic ," thus resulting in no progress. Furthermore:
A critical part of many of these debates was the fact that people who were controlling critical pieces of the infrastructure flat out refused to allow other people to step up and help, even in the face of being unable to deal with important issues themselves in a timely manner.
This kind of single-point-of-failure thing has been going on fo