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Harald Welte Calls Out Netgear's Open Source Sham
Simon80 writes "Harald Welte, known for his involvement in various open source communities, has pointed out the shortcomings of Netgear's open source router hype. Netgear's own astroturfed community site reveals that the router requires the use of binary-only kernel modules for the wireless and ethernet hardware, which is supplied by Broadcom. Also worth noting are the missing features in third-party firmware versions supplied by Netgear."
One of the open firmware shortcomings is "WPA and WPA2 are not working." That is a pretty big shortcoming.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
*looks at his brand New Atheros 9k powered wifi card which requires no firmware.*
Yes, I have no plans to utilize any cards requiring a blob again. The bar has been raised.
Some problems:
1. They are proclaiming it to be open source, which is deceptive. It's "open source" except where it matters (device drivers/modules) from a maintainability perspective.
2. Their employees are astroturfing
3. Releasing open source drivers does not in any way reveal your chip mask and hardware architecture. Atheros' real competitors have access to electron microscopes and everything else it takes to buy a router off the shelf and copy chips exactly; simply keeping the drivers closed is not going to deter, say, realtek or broadcom in the slightest.
Besides, Buffalo is supporting open source through action (money) not just in press releases - beating Netgear to the punch by a couple of years. Netgear is just playing the "me too! Signed, metoo@aol.com" game.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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But that's not their problem.
It's yours. If you cause interference because you modified the firmware to get more than 1/4 wat, and you wind up interfering with licensed spectrum, Linksys isn't going to be on the hook. You are.
There is no law against modifying electronics.
Even if you didn't modify the router, if it was interfering with licensed spectrum, it's your repsonsibility to shut it off.
The responsibility does not lie with the manufacturer. It lies with the operator.
--
BMO
Activism helps spread the word to others so that their dollars can vote too. It also more aggressively lets companies know that they've done something wrong ... sometimes they really don't know unless you tell them.
The very same Broadcom blobs are included in dd-wrt. It must also be noted that dd-wrt is supposedly GPL software, yet the evidence in SVN clearly shows that a large portion of the code is Copyright evil corporations such as Intel and Microsoft and that these corporations have NOT given permission to use the code under the GPL. It is in many cases not even clear if they give permission to distribute the code at all.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
In all fairness, Harald's original blog post isn't that rude to them; the Slashdot summary, I believe, is condescending and wrong.
However, I and many other folks are not as concerned about binary modules as Harald is. I view a binary module as a good first step - once a company gets comfortable with part of the code being open source, they'll gradually be receptive to open sourcing other modules. In many cases, yes, this takes a long time; and in some cases it causes companies to get scared and backtrack on open source commitments.
But still I view open source with some binaries as better than no commitments. I encourage people who view themselves as open source advocates to maintain a professional and respectful attitude towards companies who haven't opened up completely.
What a great way to gently remind them to have a positive attitude towards open source!
So you say we should e.g. congratulate Nvidia for supplying an obfuscated 2D-only piece of shit driver to "encourage" them to open the 3D driver as well? No, positive motivation does not work with corporations. Nothing gets done until lts of people complain. Providing half-assed open source support is actually more harmful that not providing any support at all, because it takes away the manpower needed to implement proper support. If 90% of users are satisfied with the limited functionality, it usually means you have 10x less developers working on proper support.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
My WRT54GS has been stable for fucking years, absolutely years, rock solid for yonks, working its buns off moving packets. A couple months ago, I decided I was going to look for a new router that could do everything my old 54 can do plus wireless-n at 5.8ghz (maintaining g at 2.4ghz) and gigabit ethernet. I had to look at the $250+ range and I'm not even sure if those units would do it because I didn't bother scrutinizing the specs at that price. It may have been necessary to move into commercial grade equipment to get everything I wanted. Screw that. I can just hang a 5.8ghz 'n' WAP off a gigabit switch and plug that into my old 54 for a lot less money and not have to worry about unknown bugs, stability, etc.
In fact, I'm about to pick up a 54GL for my grandfather. I made the mistake of thinking a $20 TrendNet would be fine for him since he doesn't need traffic shaping or anything beyond a basic wireless router. Wrong. Damn thing quits every 5 or 6 days like clockwork. He has to unplug/replug it to get it going again. A 54 is worth the extra money because it just frickin' works. Linksys really hit the nail on the head with that line. As long as consumer broadband is in the 10-20mbit range, I'm not going to waste my time trying other routers.
The WRT54G series all use Broadcom chips pretty much identical to the ones you'd find in Netgear routers. See here:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices#Netgear
I am not proud to admit this, but I took a CCNA years ago, and I've built literally dozens of wifi networks using various combinations of off-the-shelf (or off-the-refurbish-list) routers and stock/modified firmware. I am a minor authority on the subject of cheap-ass consumer routers.
Broadcom is what you'd call a "fabless semiconductor company," which means they design chips but don't actually manufacture them. Almost all consumer routers you can find today use Broadcom-based system-on-a-chips, which consists of basically a CPU, flash and DRAM, ethernet interface, and half a wifi-radio, all crammed onto a single CMOS.
Broadcom designs the chip, someone else leases the design for the chip (and all the accompanying drivers) from Broadcom, then the person that leased the chip pays a third person who owns a CMOS fabrication plant to actually manufacture the chip. Then the chips get sold to yet another party, like Linksys, Netgear, Trendnet, Asus (my pick!), Buffalo, and others. The chip has several dozen wires hanging off the end of it, and someone connects them to various external ports or devices on the router: ten wires make a bank of five Ethernet ports, two or four wires are connected to one or two antennas (more if you have MIMO), more wires are connected to the status LEDs and buttons, et cetera. The end manufacturer is also responsible for providing firmware, which historically they've done by combining Broadcom's drivers with some code they ripped off from the Linux kernel (some manufacturers, like Asus and Buffalo, are reputed to be good about providing source code when they do this). Then they put it in a box with a compatible power adapter, slap a lame warranty on it (because many governments and retailers require them), and sell it.
The end result is that pretty much all the routers you can buy are nearly identical in every way except firmware. Furthermore, almost no manufacturer can actually be bothered to provide long-term support for these routers (why fix a broken routers when they can sell you a new one?), and since firmware development is by far the most difficult and expensive part of what the end manufacturers (eg Linksys) actually DO, this is the area where most consumer routers really fail.
(The other problem is that most Broadcom chips only have about ~100 MB/sec of memory bandwidth on chip, tops, which is obviously less than one gigabit per second (~125MiB/sec). This means that there are no consumer routers you can buy that are actually capable of routing a gigabit of traffic per second- at best they all seem to crap out around 160 megabits per second, in my experience (note: you have even less bandwidth when traversing the NAT gateway, particularly with traffic shaping enabled). This is mostly a limit inherited from the CMOS manufacturing process they use, I think - it's the same process they use to make DRAM and flash, and while it's cheap relative to the number of transistors you get, the resulting chips are rather slow compared to what you get with optical lithography.)
As for your grandfather's router, I suggest you try running BitTorrent on a computer connected to it, and see what happens when you quickly spawn hundreds of new TCP connections. I'm betting it'll choke, because the onboard NAT has to keep track of each individual TCP connection, and your $20 Trendnet router (which is probably quite old indeed, regardless of how recently you purchased it) probably isn't expiring old TCP connections for a good 12 hours. There's probably a way you can set the NAT TCP timeout value to something more reasonable, like 15 minutes (if it's not in the web-based interface, try downloading the config file and editing it with a text editor - I shouldn't have to tell you the risk from doing this). You can also look up DD-WRT,