Introducing the LEDE project

[mbm]

Dear OpenWrt community,

It is with a great amount of surprise that, like all of you, we read 
about the announcement of the LEDE project yesterday, as there was no 
prior announcement nor clues this would happen.

While we recognize the current OpenWrt project suffers from a number of 
issues outlined by Jo-Philip, in each of the 5 bullet points, we do not 
agree with the conclusions withdrawn, and even less so in deciding to 
spin off the OpenWrt project in the first place as a way to fix the 
project and its community. Also, the phrases such as a "reboot" are both 
vague and misleading and the LEDE project failed to identify its true 
nature. The LEDE announcement  contains a number of very valid points 
which we hoped we had an opportunity to discuss and attempt to fix, in a 
public manner, before this more radical outcome. At this point, the 
email as well as actions taken are very confusing to a lot of us.

OpenWrt is primarily developed by individuals who may have a day job 
more or less related to the purpose or the technologies of the project, 
but who strive to maintain OpenWrt as independent as possible  from any 
company, organization or interest group, thus maintaining its own 
infrastructure (website, forums, mailing-lists, bugtracker...), which 
has been usually at the heart of all debates.

We do acknowledge there has been internal disagreements, on several 
occasions about some directions of the project, about the release model, 
the lack of testing, the centralized infrastructure, however, there have 
been actual work going on under the hoods to solve things one step at a 
time, starting with a more decentralized infrastructure, which was 
discussed with the LEDE developers as well.

At this point, we do not have much to offer to the LEDE developers but 
to encourage them to publicly discuss on
openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org the different items we should all be 
fixing together, and avoid spinning off so that all decisions can be 
taken with the community's involvement, and accountability and 
transparency can rule us as one community.

As a user, developer, contributor, or just community member, whatever 
choice you make, keep the choice that matters to you: the ability to 
utilize superior quality open source software to power whatever embedded 
device that matters to you!

We would like to stress that we do want to have an open discussion and 
resolve matters at hand. Our goal is to work with all parties who can 
and want to contribute to OpenWrt, including the LEDE team.

Sincerely,
Your OpenWrt team