Saturday, May 28, 2005

Open Source WRT54G

Forgot to tell you that I chose the Linksys mainly because the source is GPL'led, so you can download it and have a look at it. Also, other people than the supplier (CISCO) itself are able to fix any problem, and a lot faster than in a closed source setup. So to stimulate progress, and foster new development, we should buy these products. There are versions that support other functionality, like ssh, in the router itself. With the previous router, some years ago, I had to wait a while before it worked sufficiently well (it had some issues with passive mode FTP and its NAT tables), and it was not a good thing that I was totally depending on the supplier to fix it. Luckily, we are moving to a world in which communities can solve these problems themselves, and also support the units way longer than is ordinarily viable for suppliers.

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