State of the Union

[Imre Kaloz]

Dear developers and the broader community,

As you know, we've had multiple discussions and meetings on merging and 
continuing the work together. OpenWrt is around for a long time now and 
grown way bigger than we've ever imagined it with Mike and Gerry in 
2003. We've all learned a lot during these years but over a decade was 
also long enough to create internal politics and fractions. I really 
hope soon we won't speak about "sides" anymore, but for now, let me use 
that word due to the lack of a better one.

I believe the fork threw new light upon some of the mistakes we've been 
doing - and the fact we all had to take a deep breath and rethink some 
of the habits and do away with them.

There have been numerous delays while we've tried to address both sides' 
requests and fears. I've also spoken to multiple people personally "from 
the other side" to have a better insight on what and why happened.

I would like to let you know that Mike is fine transferring the domain 
name to SPI. It's up to him to decide if he subsequent meetingwants to 
do the legal part of it - if not, I'll do. Having more people with root 
access to the OpenWrt infrastructure was also requested, Florian has 
root for quite some time now - I hope he was able to find his way around 
already ;)

I believe there are topics we developers have to agree on and there are 
topics we should ask the community about. As you might remember, Hauke 
sent out the meeting notes on all past meetings. To be completely open, 
they went out as-is, which might have been confusing for some people. On 
the OpenWrt Summit we've said we all want to merge and on the next 
meeting we've agreed to stick to the OpenWrt name and sail under the 
same flag. This decision isn't up for the grabs, and I believe we've 
made the right choice on this one. Our community also includes the 
industry, and their efforts, contributions and needs should be also 
taken care of.

Deciding on how the merged infrastructure will work or how will we 
handle some work-flow questions are also something I would call an 
"internal decision" - but there are open questions where I strongly 
believe we are not the ones who call the shots. To name a few, I have 
doubts on how user friendly the LEDE forum engine is vs punbb (what we 
use for OpenWrt), and we should ask the community on which one should 
remain at the end. Choosing the wiki engine should be next topic and 
there are a few more where we should have a survey - most of our 
community never uses the mailing lists.

All in all, I hereby would like to ask for another (hopefully final) 
meeting between the sides. I strongly believe it's time to really bury 
the hatchet and continue working for the greater good - together.



Imre