I still have my router although its resting now in a cupboard. As Lifehacker put it way back in 2006, it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router, which likely meant it was potentially costing Cisco money to have a device this good on the market.

The article below delves a lot into what happened with the outsourcing of code (3rd part sources are often a contentious issue for later resharing code as open source) and how especially in the early years proprietary companies thought they could just use anything and then lock it down and sell it. Some sloppy outsourcing work resulted in a treasure chest being opened. So true though that with the Tomato OS that I loaded on mine it was giving me $600 performance back then. I always felt crippled when I moved to newer routers and was really missing a lot of the functionality from Tomato OS.

See https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpnpb/the-famous-router-hackers-actually-loved

#technology #hardware #opensource #linux