The *key* thing here is this router ships with 100% free software, will be
RYF certified (shortly), will be funding LibreCMC development, and is
commercially available. No other commercially available router on the market
ships with or runs a 100% free OS right now. If we get LibreCMC off the
ground that'll change and right now this is the first router.
If you wanted to go out and buy another device LibreCMC may run on it still.
It's a distribution for embedded devices after all.
The problem is that most routers and other devices are dependent on some
non-free software. Even devices that you think are 100% free software
friendly are really just less hostile. As a case in point there may be
non-free code for a gigabit switch built-into an otherwise free software
router. It's not obvious and LibreCMC may still run on it without problem. So
you'll still be running the risk of running at least some non-free software
if you buy a random router and try to run LibreCMC on it.
There is also the problem of model numbers not being sufficient to know what
your actually getting. The community regularly bricks devices in the process
of flashing them. People get upset because nobody will help them 'unbrick'
them. Sometimes you really can't unbrick them if its a true brick (at least
not without special tools, and even them I'm not 100% sure you can always
unbrick either, etc). It's really quite unreasonable to get upset over such
things when everybody has clear warnings about it, but none-the-less.
So far we have tested LibreCMC on several embedded devices and hopefully
it'll eventually get used more widely. Right now it's just this one router
and for us that's a good start. The other devices I believe we tested
against: the Ben NanoNote, another was a higher end router with more flash,
and a mini wifi adapter. There probably were a few others I'm forgetting
about. The one router might have had some non-free component for the gigabit
switch. Not sure what we concluded, but it wasn't a priority anyway given it
wasn't a device class that would have much demand.
