Zyxel Linux firmware sources

Peter plpeter2006-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Tue Oct 5 10:10:08 UTC 2010


Christopher Browne <cbbrowne at ...> writes:
> Well, and anything from /sbin/init onwards is NOT "linked to the
> kernel," and could very well be implemented independently by the
> vendor.

That may well be the case, and probably is so for large swaths of code
in the WiFi area, but that does not cover the base system and user if.
Both are clearly busybox (crippled) and (tiny?)libc based. I strongly
doubt manufacturers choose Linux kernels so they can build their effort
duplications on 'bare metal' kernel syscalls, they choose it because
the pre-existing codebase already does 90% of what they need. There is
a stark difference between adding something to a 1 million LOC system
and writing it from scratch, in man-haours and testing hours needed.

I don't have a problem with people running their proprietary binaries
on top of a Linux kernel and standard system tools but I do have one
when the kernel and the standard system tools are crippled and mis-
represented. In this case there were several bugs I had to work around
and could not. RMS was not joking in his GPL when he wrote about "the
freedom to change and improve", and let's not forget the role a certain
buggy printer driver played in the genesis of the GPL.

-- Peter


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