OpenWRT One is not FSF RYF compliant [LWN.net]

OpenWRT One is not FSF RYF compliant

Posted Apr 3, 2025 12:23 UTC (Thu) by gioele (subscriber, #61675)
In reply to: OpenWRT One is not FSF RYF compliant by farnz
Parent article: Making the OpenWrt One

> I do find a great irony in the fact that the OpenWRT One has chosen to maximize the chances of being fully "Free Software" in the long run by doing something that's directly in opposition to the FSF's RYF program. The SFC is clearly encouraging people to reverse-engineer the blobs, and produce something that's fully Free, rather than shoving the blobs in read-only memory and meeting the FSF's RYF criteria with something that will never be fully Free.

For this strategy to be viable, OpenWRT One will need to remain 1) in production and 2) relevant enough for the time it will take to reverse engineer the blobs to the point they reach a sufficient level of functionality.

I wish OpenWRT and SFC success in their endeavor, but a counterexample could be PC Engines's APU units that have been widely deployed for two decades and underwent practically no hardware changes, yet most of their NICs and WiFi cards (all except one?) do not have free firmwares.

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OpenWRT One is not FSF RYF compliant

Posted Apr 3, 2025 12:51 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

On the other hand, it's trivial to make the PC Engines APUs FSF RYF compliant - just add read-only media, and put the blobs on that media, then rearrange things so that the firmware can only be loaded from that read-only media (which could be as trivial as a rewritable flash chip with a track cut so that you can't assert write-enable).

At least in the case of the OpenWRT One, it's possible to free it; if I made the changes needed to comply with the FSF's RYF program, it is never possible to replace those blobs, ever - you are tied to non-free firmware forever.

OpenWRT One is not FSF RYF compliant

Posted Apr 3, 2025 12:57 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> For this strategy to be viable, OpenWRT One will need to remain 1) in production and 2) relevant enough for the time it will take to reverse engineer the blobs to the point they reach a sufficient level of functionality.

As someone who has written low-level radio firmware [1] and done a lot of hardware-level reverse engineering, the odds of this ever happening are vanishingly small.

(For the record, I *strongly* agree with the SFC's attitude towards firmware, and consider the FSF's "RYF" approach to be objectively and morally *wrong*)

[1] 802.11g-era Wifi, Bluetooth, and some custom stuff