OpenWRT One Released: First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt

Friday the Software Freedom Conservancy announced the production release of the new OpenWrt One network router — designed specifically for running the Linux-based router OS OpenWrt (a member project of the SFC). 'This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind.

'The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable.'
This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like.

The OpenWrt One demonstrates what's possible when hardware designers and manufacturers prioritize your software right to repair; OpenWrt One exuberantly follows these requirements of the copyleft licenses of Linux and other GPL'd programs. This device provides the fully copyleft-compliant source code release from the start. Device owners have all the rights as intended on Day 1; device owners are encouraged to take full advantage of these rights to improve and repair the software on their OpenWrt One. Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case (or US$68.42 for a caseless One's logic board), it's ready for a wide variety of use cases...

This new product has completed full FCC compliance tests; it's confirmed that OpenWrt met all of the FCC compliance requirements. Industry 'conventional wisdom' often argues that FCC requirements somehow conflict with the software right to repair. SFC has long argued that's pure FUD. We at SFC and OpenWrt have now proved copyleft compliance, the software right to repair, and FCC requirements are all attainable in one product!

You can order an OpenWrt One now! Since today is the traditional day in the USA when folks buy gifts for love ones, we urge you to invest in a wireless router that can last! We do expect that for orders placed today, sellers will deliver by December 22 in most countries... Regardless of where you buy from, for every purchase of a new OpenWrt One, a US$10 donation will go to the OpenWrt earmarked fund at Software Freedom Conservancy. Your purchase not only improves your software right to repair, but also helps OpenWrt and SFC continue to improve the important software and software freedom on which we all rely!


LWN.net points out that OpenWrt has also 'served as the base on which a lot of network-oriented development (including the bufferbloat-reduction work) has been done.'

The OpenWrt One was designed to be a functional network router that would serve as a useful tool for the development of OpenWrt itself. To that end, the hope was to create a device that was entirely supported by upstream free software, and which was as unbrickable as it could be... The OpenWrt One comes with a two-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 256MB of NAND flash memory. There is also a separate, read-only 16MB NOR flash array in the device. Normally, the OpenWrt One will boot and run from the NAND flash, but there is a small switch in the back that will cause it to boot from the NOR instead. This is a bricking-resistance feature; should a software load break the device, it can be recovered by booting from NOR and flashing a new image into the NAND array...

After booting into the new image, the One behaved like any other OpenWrt router... What could be more interesting is seeing this router get into the hands of developers and enthusiasts who will use it to make OpenWrt (and other small-system distributions) better.


Long-time Slashdot reader dumfrac writes:

The intent to build the device was announced on the OpenWRT forums earlier this year. It is based on MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) SoC and MediaTek MT7976C dual-band WiFi 6 chipset and the board is made by Banana Pi.

A poll to select the logo was run in April on the OpenWRT forums, and now the hardware is available for purchase..

Read more of this story at Slashdot.