reboot

[John Crispin]

the reboot was not meant to be hostile or disruptive to OpenWrt. we are
just code nerds and messed up the politics of the launch at some places,
which in itself shows one of the reasons that motivated the reboot. the
whole idea is to give up our control over parts of the politics and
attract a new generation. a small none elected crowd has been making
decisions that essentially are not ours to make but effect us all. these
decisions have been made largely behind closed doors.

the whole thing started by the workload becoming unbearable on a few. we
felt the need to simply stop or make drastic changes. giving up and just
letting it all bitrot seemed to be the easy way out, but we did feel
that we had a debt to our own heritage. simply leaving seemed bad and
unfair on the community. we decided to get the project back on track
instead.

we’ll be the first to agree that things where not peachy at times. this
however does not boil down to one single event, one single person or one
single flamewar. we are just many strong minded people that had
different opinions on many matters. due to the governance rules that we
setup and created and the way in which we managed the project it was
hard to mitigate these problems.

the reason for not involving everyone at the start is pretty simple and
nerdy. when the idea came up we just looked at who was the most active
in the various software trees the last 6 months and proposed our idea to
the 5 most active core devs and power users. it was a simple choice of
numbers and perceived activity. the feedback was rather overwhelming and
things just picked up a certain momentum leading to the status quo. i
guess the excitement for fixing long standing issues just took over.

i have been asked by luka why we consider this a reboot rather than a
fork. i actually had to think about that one. a fork for me means that
one party splits with a second. that was not our intent. we wanted to
split with the errors we have done ourselves in the past and the wrong
management decision that were made at times. the gap between core
developers, power users and endusers had grown way too big. hence i
consider this more a “We are forking ourselves” or as we put it,
rebooting the system.

to sum it up, my personal reasoning why i endorse this … the now 20 year
olds like social media, github, clouds and what nots. for me to continue
shaping a development and political system that they should use in their
future to run on their routers when i am already double their age is not
ideal. the next generation should be given the freedom to shape their
own future and learn from their mistakes the same way we shaped our
future and learned form our mistakes. i sincerely hope that the reboot
will encourage people to step up and not only have good ideas of what
should be fixed but will start to shape their future themselves

	John