Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by majormajor 1165 days ago
> Most importantly, open firmware can stabilize the value of a product, increasing its resale price and delaying price decline. Unfortunately, this is the point that many companies consider negative, because they don't want to compete with themselves.

Can you share some examples of this?

1 comments

Linksys got GPL'd when they released the WRT54G which spawned off OpenWRT, ddwrt, and friends. This blunder on their part sparked a boon of open source firmware development, which ultimately made the WRT54G very popular. Compatibility with open source firmware is a hard requirement for any new router purchases that I make
The GPL code release also only happened because of GPL enforcement, some of the history is written about here:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st...

Several years back, I put Tomato firmware on an old WRT54G when all my old 802.11N devices were constantly crashing.

It was 100% worth the bandwidth downgrade. I practically never had to touch that router again.

I hope to never buy a router without DD-WRT (or equivalent free software) support again.