In these posts we will talk about everything that a “generic” router can do, one of those that telecommunications companies give away when you contract an ADSL. We will start with a little history, commenting on how thanks to open source licenses today we can have a free router with functionalities that sometimes not even the most expensive dream of.
History#
This story begins in December 2002 with the launch of the WRT54G router, a router that became known because it offered 802.11g (54Mb) wifi connectivity instead of 802.11 (11Mb), the most used in those years and also at an affordable price.
Because of this, a small company such as Linksys at that time began to become known, however its biggest leap was yet to come. Some hackers related to the FSF began to do a little reverse engineering to find out what was under the hood of their router and of course they were surprised to find out that it was a modified Linux OS that it used to work.
It is understandable that the small Linksys decided to introduce Linux, a pre-existing, stable and quite secure OS, adapting it to its needs, hand in hand with another company Sveasoft’s software, to be able to compete in a market of large companies that could manufacture their own embedded operating systems.
But Linux is an operating system that is distributed under GPL license which means that all modifications must be released just like the original, which forced Linksys to publish the code of said firmware and that of other routers of the sameseries.
From there, a multitude of firmwares created by the community began to appear, from that code or from 0. Which acquired great popularity within the community and led to turning the WRT54G](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#WRT54G) [and its successors into the best-known routers in history, turning Lynksis into a large company that was acquired by Cisco in 2003 and opening an unexpected, forced and beneficial market segment thanks to free software.
In fact, to this day they are still making profits and releasing new models based on this model, such as the new Linksys WRT 1900AC, (affiliate) which Linksys Vice President Mike Chen said “will be the most powerful router of its kind on the market. We have not skimped to make this router the dream of any advanced user”.
Featured open source firmwares#
Of the open source firmwares, we will highlight two:
- DD-WRT: It was the most famous at the beginning and until its version 23 it was based on the code released by Linksys, from then on it was based on Open WRT, it has great functionalities and is easier to use than Open WRT
- Open WRT: It was the first one that appeared of those that remain today, its code was made from scrach and it is the one that has the greatest compatibility with all types of routers. It is the one we will use in the second part of this series of posts.
In honor of the truth, it must be said that Lynksis later continued to bet on proprietary software, as is the case of VxWorks and that the confrontation that forced the release of the firmware code of the WRT54G was not the last between the FSF and Cisco but that is another story.
