I have a question, i came across a linus tech tip video about a stream locator and the device runs on openwrt with the special features, is there an open source or free version that would work on ope wrt x86? Rather not pay $99 for a wifi router when i already have a customfirewall. And wifi AP's on my network
You missed the part where there is a monthly subscription fee after the first year - I think it was $8 per month? That makes me think there's a lot more to it than Linus explained and I doubt you'll be able to get that for free
1 Like
nah, I just forgot to mention it....
I guess the only solution here is someone to buy it and reverse engineer its tech so we can all install it for free 
2 Likes
When i watched the video my first thought was it was just a clever implementation of the Policy Based Routing plugin and nothing more.
If you read their website (plus, Linus actually went into detail about this), there's some clarification - the router is just a "nice to have" hardware piece, the real magic happens within StreamLocator's "cloud". They basically have a number of proxy servers that act kiiiiinda like VPN, but only for a specific set of requests.
The reason why nobody will reverse engineer it and "make it free" is because that $8/month fee actually goes towards the upkeep of these proxy servers.
@lantis1008 sure, it is policy-based routing, but with their own servers acting as proxies inbetween. The point of this is to avoid the regular VPN-ban-spree Netflix goes on. It's akin to using a more obscure VPN.
That's not a good reason. I may still want to pay that fee ($5 a month, BTW), for the convenience of being able to run it as a separate VM on my server and acting as a system DNS server without me having to map streaming domains to smartDNS proxy servers. Consider this list, which is already out of date: https://getflix.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/201056954-Can-I-selectively-use-Getflix-DNS-servers-for-specific-domains-
Aren't they obliged to actually publish the OpenWRT image to comply with the licensing? Why would reverse engineering even be needed at all?
You'll have to ask them to provide such a build then.
They're not obliged to publish the images at all, in a user-accessible form.
And no, technically they don't have to provide the whole source. Even though OpenWrt is GPL2 covered, the build system supports sourcing packages from other repos, not just the main tree (this is how e.g. GL.inet builds their images - get core stuff from the openwrt repo, then their own packages from another). Those packages are not GPL covered, similar to e.g. Linux kernel modules' binary firmware blobs.
Of course StreamLocator has to provide the sources they used that are GPL 2.0 covered to anyone in possession of the binary version. Basically, only to those who have bought their router, and have requested them. They're in no way obliged to pre-emptively publish it to GitHub, or even make the public. It only has to be provided to those who have the binary version.
Your best bet is to ask them for public packages, but I doubt they will go with that, there's just no justified reason to do so, financially speaking. Your use case is very rare, there would only be a handful of users doing their own installs (compared to the whole userbase), but maintaining public packages comes with immense responsibility of support on unknown configurations...
it really is. We are not talking of standalone devices but cloud-managed stuff. There are plenty ways to make their cloud infrastructure just straight-out refuse any connection from source-built software not running on their hardware, thanks to crypto stuff with keys and signatures and whatnot.
So even assuming it's not particularly locked down right now, they could easily push updates to lock out everyone they don't like, so all the blood and tears you spent in reverse-engineering will be for nothing.
Yes, the OpenWrt source code and build system modifications they did. That's what is required by the license of OpenWrt.
Not the custom config they used, nor any crypto key used to lock down the device nor any closed source package they added. Packages can have any kind of license and just because they are installed on OpenWrt their license isn't overridden. That's not how software licenses work. Opensource isn't Soviet Russia.