[Cerowrt-devel] Introducing the LEDE project

[John Crispin]

The LEDE project is founded as a spin-off of the OpenWrt project and
shares many of the same goals. We are building an embedded Linux
distribution that makes it easy for developers, system administrators or
other Linux enthusiasts to build and customize software for embedded
devices, especially wireless routers. The name 'LEDE' stands for 'Linux
Embedded Development Environment'.

Members of the project already include a significant share of the most
active members of the OpenWrt community. We intend to bring new life to
Embedded Linux development by creating a community with a strong focus
on transparency, collaboration and decentralisation.

LEDE’s stated goals are:
- Building a great embedded Linux distribution with focus on stability
and functionality.
- Having regular, predictable release cycles coupled with community
provided device testing feedback.
- Establishing transparent decision processes with broad community
participation and public meetings.

We decided to create this new project because of long standing issues
that we were unable to fix from within the OpenWrt project/community:
1. Number of active core developers at an all time low, no process for
getting more new people involved.
2. Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by internal disagreements
and single points of failure.
3. Lack of communication, transparency and coordination in the OpenWrt
project, both inside the core team and between the core team and the
rest of the community.
4. Not enough people with commit access to handle the incoming flow of
patches, too little attention to testing and regular builds.
5. Lack of focus on stability and documentation.

To address these issues we set up the LEDE project in a different way
compared to OpenWrt:
1. All our communication channels are public, some read-only to
non-members to maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio.
2. Our decision making process is more open, with an approximate 50/50
mix of developers and power users with voting rights.
3. Our infrastructure is simplified a lot, to ensure that it creates
less maintenance work for us.
4. We have made our merge policy more liberal, based on our experience
with the OpenWrt package github feed.
5. We have a strong focus on automated testing combined with a
simplified release process.

We would like to thank the communities using the codebase and would
welcome endorsements. If your community feels that the idea is good and
will benefit all our communities as a whole then please post an
endorsement on the lede-dev mailing list.

Find out more on our project website http://lede-project.org/

Daniel Golle
Felix Fietkau
Hauke Mehrtens
Jo-Philipp Wich
John Crispin
Matthias Schiffer
Steven Barth