Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Tuesday 1 July 2008, 3:42 PM
Netgear launches open-source Wi-Fi router
There's been a long history of unauthorised open source Wi-Fi on Linksys' WRT54G router. Now Netgear's jumping in with an official open source router.
There's nothing too unusual about Netgear's KWGR614 and WGR614L routers. They're 802.11g devices, and they are based on Linux, like a host of other routers based on the Broadcom chipset. That's the same as in Linksys's WRT54G - in 2003 activists spotted the use of Linux and demanded source code from Linksys, under the GPL licence. Linksys complied, which led to a lot of open source activity, described here and here .
But that was imposed on Linksys. Netgear seems to be getting proactive, setting up its own site, MyOpenRouter to encourage developers to work on the WGR614L. THere are already a couple of alternative firmware builds, including Tomato, DD-WRT and an independent build which adds WPA2 encryption and mulitple SSIDs for guest access.
There's nothing too unusual about Netgear's KWGR614 and WGR614L routers. They're 802.11g devices, and they are based on Linux, like a host of other routers based on the Broadcom chipset. That's the same as in Linksys's WRT54G - in 2003 activists spotted the use of Linux and demanded source code from Linksys, under the GPL licence. Linksys complied, which led to a lot of open source activity, described here and here .
But that was imposed on Linksys. Netgear seems to be getting proactive, setting up its own site, MyOpenRouter to encourage developers to work on the WGR614L. THere are already a couple of alternative firmware builds, including Tomato, DD-WRT and an independent build which adds WPA2 encryption and mulitple SSIDs for guest access.
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