LEDE and OpenWRT promise a joint release soon

It all started in March 2016, when a group of developers, unhappy with where OpenWRT was heading, created LEDE or the Linux Embedded Development

Environment. The group created the alternative LEDE since the concern was that

OpenWRT lacked a process to bring new core developers into the project at a time developer numbers were dwindling.

At the end of 2016, the two groups started discussing merging again, and in

May 2017, they reached an agreement on the terms of a merger. The OpenWRT and LEDE open source router projects have now merged and a major release is due in the coming months.

OpenWRT has been known as a serious open source codebase for router firmware. It allows users to overwrite vendor firmware, either for security reasons or to conduct their own low level development.

At the time of the split, LEDE was led by Jo-Philipp Wich, John Crispin, Daniel Golle, Felix Fietkau, Hauke Mehrtens, Matthias Schiffer and Steven Barth.

The OpenWRT - LEDE merged open source router project has now gone live. 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 (which means no security or bug fixes), and the project team 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.