Mirror of an interview discussing the difference between OpenWRT and FreeWRT
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From http://seclog.code-foundation.de/
Interview: “Don’t open your WRT, free it!” September 11th, 2006
An interview with Waldemar Brodkorb, founder and current project leader of FreeWRT. As the first release of FreeWRT is due in about three weeks, we took the opportunity to talk with Waldemar, who did a lot of development work for OpenWrt, about the OpenWrt fork, his and FreeWRT’s goals and the new features implemented in the upcoming release. We also have a short excursus on FON (yet again).
seclog: You left the OpenWrt project around may/june this year to start FreeWRT. In the forefront of this step, there have been differences between you and some other OpenWrt developers. What were these differences all about and what was crucial about leaving the project completely and not just parallely starting a new one?
Waldemar Brodkorb: We had a lot of technical discussions mostly in IRC sessions and very seldom via mail. Very often the discussions end up without any agreement. Since April I am working in a project near Stuttgart, where I have no real internet access and no time for chatting, because I am working onside at customers place. I think at this time I realized I could no longer follow the OpenWrt development, if some of the communication channels did not change. I asked again for mailinglists, but then the old discussion about the forum and mailinglist integration raised and it was promised to solve this problem when Whiterussian rc5 was released.
This did not happen and the communication between me and the team remained bad. After the meeting between three OpenWrt developers, the DD-Wrt developer and FON in spain, I was a little bit angry, because it would have been a chance to have a big developers meeting. We missed this chance, mostly because of miscommunication. After that, I decided to fork the distribution and try to implement my ideas. Shortly after I had told the OpenWrt developers about my idea, Imre Kaloz closed my account and even removed my mail address completely. It was not my decision to leave the project completely.
seclog: In an open letter to the OpenWrt community you complain about the communication between the developers and the lack of transparency. What did or does not comply with your ideas? What would you do instead and how is it solved in the FreeWRT community?
WB: I am using Open Source since more than 10 years. Every project I ever liked to ask questions about, respond to questions, send patches or try to develop for had a public mailinglist. OpenWrt lacks public mailinglists and I missed them a lot. OpenWrt is not very open to new developers. A developer in the OpenWrt project is described as person who regulary commits stuff to the svn repository. It is very hard to get all the privileges to use the complete infrastructure. For example I never got root access on the project server and I have never seen any statistics how often the OpenWrt website is visited or how many people downloaded the firmware images. In the FreeWRT project we have public mailinglists. New developers have a low entry point and are allowed to use the complete infrastructure. We accept developers, who just do documentation, testing and public relations work. I always try to contact new developers directly via phone to be sure we have the same goal.
seclog: The goals you’d like to achieve with the FreeWRT project sound quite ambitious:
- A professional looking and accessible website (which is always somewhat depending on your point of view)
- Regular releases with a predictable release cycle
- incremental changes between releases
- low entry barrier for both users and developers
- reliable update mechanism for security updates
- live CD
It seems a bit like you are trying to build something for OpenWrt, what Ubuntu is to Debian. This sounds big - How many developers does the FreeWRT project count by now? In which term do you think you can achieve those goals? Some of them have the sound of ‘fulltime developer’ and ‘big funding’. Straightforward: which Mark Shuttleworth will take over the financial aspect of development, respectively which Doc Emmett Brown will give you all the time?
WB: Right now the FreeWRT project has 10 developers. All of them are part time developers. In the beginning of october a full time developer will join our team for at least 5 months. He is the third developer getting payed for development by me or my company. At the moment we have no big funding and my time is very limited. I like to reach the goals by providing a nice framework for Linux embedded development. When more companys use the framework, more people will work on the code base.
I cannot look into the future, but I think other companys will sponsor the project with money, manpower or infrastructure. Two weeks ago I got a sponsoring from Hosteurope, a big server housing company in Germany. We now have a second fast project server with minimal costs and very good bandwith and availability.
seclog: At the moment FreeWRT is available only as snapshot but according to the roadmap the first release is due in 3 weeks. Will the 1.0 be released in time?
WB: Not sure. There is one important feature missing for 1.0: A reliable update mechanism without loosing the configuration of the embedded system. Next week I have a hacking weekend with one of our developers and I hope we can implement the feature. I will decide about the release at the end of the month.
seclog: If I do use openWrt whiterussian right now, why should I switch to FreeWRT? What are the major improvements, what is new? WB: The major improvements at the moment are mostly interesting for developers, who like to build an appliance on one of the supported devices. FreeWRT is a mix of Whiterussian and Kamikaze. I mixed up the best of both branches. After that, we added portability code, so you can use the FreeWRT buildsystem on other hostsystems then Linux. That’s very important for me, because I am using OpenBSD on my laptop and now can work 6 hours every week while I travel between Bonn and Stuttgart.
seclog: To target a larger user group: The freifunk-firmware is based on openWrt. Should they switch? If so, why?
WB: It depends. If they are happy with OpenWrt there is no reason to switch. I always tried to work together with some of the Freifunk projects (Dortmund, Berlin, Hamburg) and tried to get their stuff into the OpenWrt base. If they need a better platform, which does not change important parts of the base system between release candidates, I am more than happy to provide a stable base distribution for them. Many projects using a distribution as base for a project need a stable release.
seclog: I just mentioned some of your goals, lets go a bit more into detail: When we are talking about a reliable update mechanism and incremental changes between the releases, are we talking about an ipkg-based architecture? Can you give some technical details on how this is going to work?
WB: It depends on the root filesystem you decided to use for your embedded system and on the part of the firmware you want to update. If you chose a completely writable root filesystem for your embedded system, you can do updates of single software packages with ipkg. In all other cases you need to reflash the complete firmware. For this it is more important to have a solution, where to save your configuration data, so that it is not deleted while your are updating. We will have an extra partition called “configfs” with a size of 128 kB. This flash partition will contain /etc in a compressed tar format. On bootup the tar archive is extracted and mounted to /etc. If you make any changes to /etc and are happy with them, you have to start an application, which will write the changes to the configfs partition. If you update your embedded system, you will only update the kernel and all applications. This mechanism is only for minor updates and not for a major release update, where startup scripts may have changed. But this feature is enough if you want to develop an appliance and need to update remotely more than 5 embedded systems.
seclog: If I got it right, FreeWRT by now uses the build system of whiterussian (buildroot). On the side of OpenWrt, there is a new buidroot-ng on the way. Do you consider using it?
WB: No. From my point of view Buildroot-ng does only bring cosmetic changes. It is the old buildroot with a high grade of abstraction. It just uses a lot of more GNU make magic to make a package Makefile more readable and simple. It does not gain any improvements for me as an embedded systems developer. The OpenWrt developers are perfectionists, the last 5 % [of development, the editor] cost a lot of time, but gain not much improvement for a new user.
seclog: You also got a comment from some OpenEmbedded guy offering to add FreeWRT to the OE development repository. I personally enjoy the diversity of applications that is provided by OE when it comes to the Opie running on my Ipaq but it also brings some problems due to its sheer size. Did you try development in the context of OE and do/did you consider accepting the offer?
WB: Before I started to integrate buildroot2 into OpenWrt some time ago, I evaluated some buildsystems. Buildroot2 is doing a great job and I like it. I never understood the OE buildsystem, so I see no reason to switch. OE is very good, but my Python capabilities are bad and I have no idea why I should switch, when I already got used to a very good buildsystem.
seclog: Another goal of FreeWRT is a low entry barrier for both users and developers. How do you want to achieve that one for both groups respectively and which role does the planned Live CD play in this context?
WB: The Live CD will be for people having no supported host system, but still want to compile their own firmware for one of the supported embedded systems. FreeWRT is a framework, is is not designed for any special purpose. You are always free to create your own firmware to realize a wlan-router, a vpn router, a firewall, a music server, a fileserver or anything you like. We will develop a web interface so that you can combinate all components without even compiling a single line of source code.
seclog: Short excursion in the end: let’s talk about FON. You did warn people to talk about this topic while you are around and did promise some ranting if they do. Why?
WB: There is a long answer in my personal blog. The short answer: Because they are realizing an idea of mine with software I have partly developed. And they have done it in a very bad way. So I am partly jealous of that and partly afraid.
seclog: You did accidently have a look at the FON-firmware and you wrote about something, which sounds like a mighty phone-home feature? What is this all about?
WB: They have the technical possibility to do anything on the router you bought from them! And if you bought it, you agreed to that one:
“6.10. FON reserves the right at all times to disclose any user information as FON deems necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request.”
seclog: Do you think there is a piece of the highspeed-internet pie reserved for FON? The whole company has a bit of the ‘burn more money’-sound of the deceased New Economy.
WB: You had an nice article about FON called “Is FON evil?“. My answer to this question is: YES. If you asked me if Google is evil, I would answer the same. And as everybody knows, Google is investing money into the FON idea.
seclog: Thank you for the interview and your detailed answers!