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sophrosyne42 11 hours ago

Open firmware would become commercially viable when IP is abolished

AshamedCaptain 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How do you see firmware becoming more open without copyright exactly?

amlib 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Not prosecuting people trying to reverse engineer any kind of software would be a great start...

mindslight 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm no fan of imaginary property, but you're going to have to lay out your reasoning here. Firmware security is such crap precisely because most hardware manufacturers see it as nothing but a cost center they wish they could avoid.

The difficulty of installing OpenWRT or Linux in general on hardware comes from that hardware not being documented, or not having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.

Or for some devices, community distributions that dubiously remix manufacturer-supplied binaries are available. But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.

M95D 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> not having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.

Oh, no, not this again!

> But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.

Care to demonstrate that?

The reason OpenWrt abandoned most routers was

1) insufficient flash space in the kernel partition, or insufficient total flash space in no-USB, no-SPI routers,

2) unwillingness to repartition flash because it breaks compatibility with official firmware (as if anyone installing OpenWrt would care),

3) insufficient RAM to run newer kernels

and, most importantly,

4) unwillingness to support older kernels like DD-WRT does.