Am Montag, 4. Juni 2007 22:46:47 schrieb Waldemar Brodkorb:
> Hi,

Hi Waldemar & developers

> I decided to rearrange my master plan for FreeWRT development. I
> will focus on FreeWRT 1.1 in the next months. Brcm-2.6 support will
> be removed very soon. The reason for that is very simple.
>
> I will not invest more time into crappy hardware from big companys,
> who does not play nice with the community. There are a lot of open
> hardware projects available and we should support them, if we can.

That's true. But we shouldn't drop brcm-2.4 in freewrt 1.1. I know that even 
for 2.4 the broadcom drivers and userspace utilities are crappy and not very 
easy to integrate into freewrt, but for the majority of the users the 
broadcom wlan is already working good enough in 1.0 for their setups. The 
most people don't need multiple ssid's, wds, and other stuff and so it might 
be ok to simply not support this kind of stuff for broadcom based systems now 
(1.0) and in future (1.1). Even the majority of users don't need 2.6 for 
their asus, so I think it's ok to not bring 2.6 for asus routers in 1.1.

Furthermore I think it's fine if we advise people with routers using the 
broadcom wlan to change the minipci wlan card to something that we can 
support better if they really need the more advanced features.

The broadcom based asus routers are quite cheap, fast and easy to 
flash/recover, so I think it should be one of the major targets (even if its 
only with 2.4 kernels) for freewrt 1.1. Of course routerboard and maybe the 
most important (still buyable) netgear & linksys routers are also important. 
but it's ok to keep the list of supported devices small in general.

> Furthermore we have a nice OpenWrt release, which everyone can use, if
> somebody needs Broadcom Routers with 2.6!

Waldemar, is that really you writing this? :)

but of course you are right with this statement. we cannot support every 
combination if we want to have a stable and innovative adk & linux distro for 
at least some popular embedded devices, so if people have other aims or want 
to use other devices another embedded os is the best choice for them. Quality 
and not quantity is important for us, even if some users might change their 
router-os because of that.

> I am still unsure how to handle the old not buyable hardware
> from Netgear, Asus and Linksys. We are a small team, we should focus
> on realistic goals.

Keep the support for the devices that are already in 1.0 for (maybe still) 
upcoming  minor 1.0 subreleases, but for me it's ok to drop some devices for 
1.1. Everything else would make more problems than we can solve, at least if 
the amount of active developers is not getting bigger in the same amount as 
the supported hardware.

If someone really wants to keep one of these devices in 1.1, then he should 
get the chance to keep one of these devices in 1.1, if he is willing and able 
to support this platform on his own, But core developers should be able to 
work on problems and new features instead of supporting old hardware that is 
not available anymore.

> Comments please!

nothing easier than that.

you said that you want to work more on freewrt 1.1 in future. Maybe it's 
helping you when someone takes over 1.0 tasks for you. If you agree and like 
that idea, then I would be willing to be something like the "1.0 release 
maintainer/manager" or whatsoever. I think I am able to help with thinks like 
looking for security updates, writing release notes/announcements, preparing 
new 1.0 releases. But (especially for the beginning) I definitly might need 
some help with one or the other aspect of this. But because I haven't looked 
very closely into 1.1, but I am more familiar with 1.0 anyways, this might a 
good solution for all of us. I think the majority of developers are focusing 
on 1.1 already...

> There is always a chance for a voting to get a new project leader.

hmmm, I really stopped a moment after reading this sentence, especially after 
the linuxtag was really a success (in my opinion). Who would be a good 
alternative? I think you are doing a great job with freewrt so far and at 
least none of the active freewrt developers would be able to keep this work 
up at this high level.

or do you just want a democratic authorisation for this (and maybe other 
upcoming) decisions in the freewrt project?

if you really want an 100% open opensource project, then maybe a constitution 
would be a good think. maybe project leader elections like debian does...

But to be honest, for the moment I think this would be overkill and maybe a 
really big mistake to have elections, because we are too small for really 
needing that and I am very happy with you as project leader. From my point of 
view none of your decisions in the past were wrong and you are really doing a 
great job which nobody else could do half as good as you already done in the 
past. A project leader needs social skills, commitment, technical knowledge 
and a vision and you have all of this. freewrt without you would not be 
freewrt at all.

And I think we are democraticly enough. I am sure you never would do something 
if you exactly knew that the majority of developers and maybe even of the 
users would be against, so at least the the "mass" of people that are in 
touch with freewrt have some kind of "veto" and that is more then we have in 
our so called democracy country. politicans are often not even listening to 
the majority of their citizens.

> Have fun!
>  Waldemar

n8,
 Ralph
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