OpenWrt can be said to be the most famous home WiFi router Linux distribution in the world, birthed from the once obscure Linksys WRT54G router, and has been around for more than 12 years. In early May 2016, the OpenWrt user community announced another OpenWrt: the Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE). The official explanation states that LEDE is a branch, or byproduct, of OpenWrt, with the project primarily focusing on transparency, collaboration, and decentralization.
LEDE is the new birth of the OpenWrt community, with many goals similar to OpenWrt, but also significant differences.
The current goals of LEDE are:
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To build a massive embedded Linux distribution, primarily focusing on stability and functionality.
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To have a regular, predictable release cycle.
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To establish a transparent decision-making process, strengthening community involvement and public feedback.
The creation of LEDE was prompted by some longstanding issues with OpenWrt that had remained unresolved:
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Low activity among core developers, with no strategy to encourage more new members to join.
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Unreliable infrastructure, hindered by sporadic failures and internal disagreements.
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Lack of communication, transparency, and collaboration, both within the core team and between the core team and the community.
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Few committers, with little focus on testing and regular builds.
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Neglect of stability and documentation.
To address these issues, the LEDE project was created, differing from OpenWrt in the following ways:
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All communication channels are public, with some read-only access restricted to non-developers.
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The decision-making process is fair and open, with approximately 50/50 voting rights between developers and authoritative users.
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The infrastructure is very simple, reducing the difficulty of maintenance work.
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Based on feedback received on OpenWrt packages on Github, the merging strategy is more flexible.
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Strong emphasis on automated testing, establishing a simple release process.
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