Introducing the LEDE project

[Felix Fietkau]

Hi Mike,

thank you for reaching out to us and for your interest in addressing
these issues.

On 2016-05-04 21:01, mbm wrote:
> 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 agree with the conclusions withdrawn, and even less so in deciding to 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.
Many of the changes that we previously tried to introduce were often
squashed by internal disagreements. Resulting discussions often turned
toxic quickly and led to nothing being done to address the issues.
Setting up the LEDE project was our way of creating a testbed for
changes that we believe are important for the survival of the project.

> 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.
A critical part of many of these debates was the fact that people who
were controlling critical pieces of the infrastructure flat out refused
to allow other people to step up and help, even in the face of being
unable to deal with important issues themselves in a timely manner.

This kind of single-point-of-failure thing has been going on for years,
with no significant progress on resolving it.

In the LEDE project we decided to significantly simplify the
infrastructure and spread out admin access enough to minimize the chance
of this situation ever happening again.

> 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.
While we have pushed for and actively worked on decentralizing the
infrastructure, we were also frequently asked to move back to
centralizing things again.
The excessive downtime of the main site this year is a good example of
why we definitely don't want to go that way.

> 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.
Do you think we can get the changes outlined by the LEDE project
implement in OpenWrt? If so, how?

> 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.
We appreciate your effort to have an open discussion about this, however
the sudden deletion of our widely published openwrt.org email addresses
somewhat undermines this.
We will not respond in kind and we will continue to maintain the
critical parts of OpenWrt infrastructure that we control.

Regards,

Felix Fietkau
Jo-Philipp Wich