LEDE and OpenWRT kiss and make up

The OpenWRT and LEDE open router projects have merged and promised a major release in the coming months.

OpenWRT was, for years, the only serious open source codebase for router firmware, allowing users to overwrite vendor firmware, either for security reasons or to conduct their own low-level development.

LEDE was created in March 2016 when a group of developers, unhappy with where OpenWRT was going, created the alternative Linux Embedded Development Environment. The LEDE group was concerned that OpenWRT lacked a process to bring new core developers into the project at a time when developer numbers were dwindling.

When the split first emerged, we reported that LEDE was led by Jo-Philipp Wich, John Crispin, Daniel Golle, Felix Fietkau, Hauke Mehrtens, Matthias Schiffer and Steven Barth.

At the end of 2016, the two groups started discussing merging again, and in May 2017, they reached agreement on the terms of a merger.

Such things take time, but the OpenWRT/LEDE merged project has now gone live at last.

The announcement says the project will be governed under the rules of the LEDE project, and that the focus will be on small, frequent minor releases, as well as stability and release maintenance.

Support has ended for OpenWRT releases prior to 15.05 (meaning no security or bugfixes), and the project has warned that OpenWRT CC 15.05 patches will run behind time for a while since it's “not yet fully integrated into our release automation”.

“The LEDE 17.01 release will continue to get full security and bug fix support for both source code and binary releases,” the project team announced. ®