[OpenWrt-Devel] Why OpenWrt sucks?

[John Clark]

On Mar 9, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Charlie Smurthwaite <charlie at atechmedia.com> wrote:

> On 09/03/15 20:02, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:
>> Main issue is that wifi chip manufacturers don't offer open source
>> wifi drivers. If Atheros and Broadcom understood Open source as Intel
>> does then you would get absolutely top speed and reliability from
>> OpenWrt wifi drivers. You don't get top notch performance with OpenWrt
>> because Atheros and Broadcom are choosing not release quality open
>> source drivers.
>> 
> I think you'll get a lot of opposition to the concept that Atheros don't contribute and support this project and Linux in general.

That should be Qualcom Atheros, and while Atheros before being acquired by Qualcom did open up with Linux support, eliminating the need for the binary HAL,
and Qualcom has supported that to some degree, for the ‘official’ software, Qualcom maintains rather high prices for ‘just source’ support, and really to make any
sense of the data sheets/docs and source, one would probably have to pay for the subscription that includes in depth seminars and presentations.

If one buys ‘off the shelf’ hardware and uses the open source drivers, along with OpenWRT, all is mostly well.

But if you alter the hardware and need to have FCC certification, Qualcom does not do any thing to help, and presents a major hinderance in its silence… well unless of course one pays, and then having the open source drivers doesn’t do much good, as one would need to use the non open sources to take advantage of the capabilities.

John.
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