Nausea Medialis

Joy oh joy. Remember the good ole days when OpenWRT accused Sveasoft of violating the GPL, only to be accused by Sveasoft themselves in return to do something similar? Welcome to the déjà vu then.

It seems DD-WRT is doing the same thing. DD-WRT does have one thing going for it: it is tightly integrated, and has a very nice web interface that allows you to set almost anything that can be set. The downside was that it is very unfriendly on the CLI - not to say crippled, when compared to OpenWRT. My Asus WL-500G has USB ports that I want to work too, and DD-WRT was no nice solution for it; I tend to go for solutions that show a lot of thought has been put into their design and implementation. Hence: exit DD-WRT.

Shady practices
Back in the days when I was trying to pimp my router (I'm a geek after all), I already noticed DD-WRT was offering 'specialised' versions, and sold routers pre-flashed with DD-WRT. So far, no biggie. Everyone is entitled to get something back for the work they put into a project, but this seems different. It seems the main developer is letting his desire to make a living of the project get the upper hand on the freedom of its users. For those not bothering to read the whole (possibly tendentious) article, I'll sum up what he seems to be doing:

• Rebranding GPL'ed software
• Taking credit for other developers' work
• Falsely pretending to be an OSS project while solliciting donations from users
• Encrypting the DD-WRT Web UI to protect against modification (if sources are available, why encrypt the final product?)
• Restricting the use of DD-WRT, hereby violating the GPL (it seems this has been fixed though)
• Requiring you to obtain a (paid) license for the x86 version (enforced by product activation)

I find all this to be quite shady. Besides this, there also seems to be a tendency to prevent users from building their own versions from source code. Sources are hard to find or seem to be uncomplete (I can personally attest, I have been looking for those sources too some time ago, and was only able to find old stuff). On the other hand you can pull down the source code from SVN. It also claims to be working closely together with OpenWRT (from which it borrowed some code) and contributing code back, but embeem (AKA mbm), an OpenWRT developer, firmly denied this:

"As one of the OpenWrt developers, I can't remember a single instance of BrainSlayer contributing back to OpenWrt or working with the OpenWrt developers. Parts of DD-WRT are copied from OpenWrt, but DD-WRT is not based on OpenWrt."

I can confirm myself building ones own image is for example quite easy on OpenWRT. Actually, for a firmware that is generally perceived as the nec plus ultra when it comes to embedded Linux, building ones own image from source code is a real piece of cake. Isn't it at the very least surprising to see that DD-WRT, a firmware touting usability and userfriendliness, does not honour the same motto when users want to take matters into their own hands? I think it is.

Controversy and GPL compliance
I understand not all these allegations may be true (or some things DD-WRT does may not be conflicting with the GPLv2, while they seem to conflict with the GPLv3). Although this particular ex-developer (Jeremy Collake AKA db90h) seems to have a (justified?) grudge against DD-WRT's main developer, he's not the only one asking questions. On his blog (which, by the way, is listed by Google as a malicious site, don't ask why) C. Jeff Keeme raises similar concerns. He points out the available firmware is quite old while development no doubt goes on (very much a Sveasoft practice), and had difficulty finding the source code too (it is not clear whether he eventually found it or not). Just like me he notes OpenWRT offers full clarity (even help) on building from source or rebranding firmware), whereas DD-WRT seems to go to great lengths to prevent users from doing this. Is this all just rumour? To me it looks like there's more than that. And I'd very much like to know what's exactly going on. If DD-WRT complains it's GPL-ed (which it does, check the homepage), then why is their GUI locked down in such a paranoid, almost Redmond-like way?

Wikipedia
Wikipedia itself seems to have picked its side too. One contributor recently removed the 'Controversy' paragraph in the DD-WRT Wikipedia entry, argumenting there is no place for things like this in an educational article. It seems rebelling 'subjects' [sic] will even be reported for re-adding it. Aren't people entitled to know about possible problems? Do they have to find out the hard way their freedom isn't being respected?

Until the DD-WRT team takes a clear stance on these issues, I am encouraging everyone running DD-WRT and who cares about the open source movement to ditch it and use an alternative that not only values the input of developers and its community, but also unambiguously respects the GNU Public License.