Does GL Technologies contribute to OpenWrt?

If so, how? If not, why? I have not found any information about this so far. I’m curious about this since it seems most of their products are built on top of openWRT. I would think it right to for them to contribute back to the community that they are profiting from, thanks.

Do you have a link?

A link for what?

Sometimes, checking the git log you'll find device additions for GL.iNet GL-B1300, GL.iNet GL-AR750S, GL-iNet GL-X750 and GL-iNet GL-AR750 signed-off by gl-inet mail addresses.

That’s a good start, thank you.

I read back through my post and thought that I should’ve included my motivation for asking. I am considering purchasing more of their products, but I want to make sure that they are not profiting from the openWRT community without giving back. I’ve heard stories of FOSS being re-packaged and sold by other companies without contributing to the original project. I don’t want to be supporting that kind of behavior with my funds. I find openWRT valuable and I want to make sure that some of the value I give to a company who uses it makes its way back to the community who is in part responsible for their success.

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The thing is selling the software would violate the license term, but selling a hardware that runs the software or a modified version of it is fine. Having said so, it's mortally the right thing to support the project in whatever way possible if your product depend on it and you make profit (not to mention the obvious business benifit).

I agree, that’s what I’m trying to get some information on.

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I am a big fan of GL.iNet hardware. I have at least five of their routers. But I buy them for the hardware, nothing else. I see what they're trying to do with the software they put on top of OpenWrt in terms of targeting a wider user group, but I don't want it. What I find annoying though is that as part of their product development they do not add support for their hardware to the main project. They have their own forks with modifications here and there, and an image builder to create a "GL.iNet" image. Obviously they get OpenWrt working on their hardware so why not do this in such a way that it is contributed back to the project?

My most recent purchase is the GL-MV1000 which I now run as my primary router at home. This has not yet been added to the project so I have to cherry pick a commit I found buried in the GL.iNet openwrt fork - 19.07 branch, and build my own image from source.

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Having dealt with a lot of GL-inet products, they are contributing device-specific patches to OpenWrt where they can (sometimes they use proprietary tools/blobs in their own firmware which cannot be contributed to OpenWrt) and of course they are profiting from using OpenWrt as a base, but that's the nature of FOSS.

If anything, we should encourage the vendor for using OpenWrt as much as they can and releasing products which are easily flashable with vanilla OpenWrt thanks to their contributions to the source code.

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