anon says: The challange is about to implement a (new) gui for the Ubiquity Router Station, based on AirOS

If you read their forums, this has been explicitly debunked. They say OpenWrt. See:

http://forum.ubnt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6734

I think any wise developer would go with OpenWrt Trunk and update every month or so during development.

I have taken some of what you say and started to compile a list on the Ubiquiti contest forums.

http://ubnt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8884

Regarding some of what you say as an OpenWrt user: I personally think any new UI should be 2.6 only and only ath5k/ath9k (no madwifi). This is complex enough, supporting these out of date platforms when a new Trendnet router has ath9k and 400Mhz CPU for $25 to $45 is available. Kenrel 2.4 is on the way out, FINALLY, b43 has already been the push of Kamikaze 8.09 release.

Man, people are so jaded here. Stop spreading misinformation. The company is giving free routers to contestants. These guys clearly seem to GET IT. But the attitudes of some in the Linux community make it seem like nobody should even try new ideas and all open source work should only be done traditional ways.

An yha, as soon as you start giving away free routers for entering a contest - guess what happens. People sign up for the free router with no intention of doing any programming. So they rightly have to evaluate how serious a entrant is. But they ARE providing free hardware.

And you can ask someone nicely on OpenWrt to help test and give feedback on your firmware. People who enter the contest are releasing their work to the project at the end, why wouldn't I want to assist them? Not everyone is selfish.

This has had considerable discussion on #OpenWrt IRC. I am not a lawyer or a certified license person. I just been in field and try to get along with this like most educated users.

My take on this:

1) They want you to transfer copyright as an employee or contractor would in USA. This would allow them to add additional licenses or what if they wish (fork the project), as they would be the official copyright holder. There is plenty of stuff in the Linux kernel that is copyright Atheros or IBM. So I don't see much concern here.

2) The open source license clearly gives you the ability to keep working on the code after you give it to them (anyone can). but I guess this would restrict entrant author from offering it commercially and open source (say how MySQL does). AGAIN, no different than I see if you work for a company as an employee and the company has copyright and your job ends.

3) I think the notice they request is not well thought out. But discussion of GPL, Apache licenses seems to me that there is no requirement that anyone keep visible output copyright notices. Only discussion of keeping copyright notices in the source code. So instantly upon release of the code one could have a patch to remove the copyright notice and ubiquity specific graphics icons from the code base and re-release it as a neutral extension to OpenWrt.

3a) I think that they should amend the rules of the contest to have it say "PORTIONS copyright" instead of absolute. It is offensive to the OpenWrt people to make it appear as if shows only one. I think this is just an oversight on Ubiquity part in contest rule. It isn't like they take this directly from contestant and release to their customers on routers - it probably go through a beta and update cycle where such issues are fixed.

I agree with your comment that it isn't trivial. But nor is $160,000 trivial to many people throughout the world. And I encourage other router and Linux vendors to consider joining the contest adding their own money. Why not add another $20,000 and a company do their own evaluation of entries and pick who they think is best?

A great response. I wished you hadn't posted anon so there could be follow-up to your experienced insight. I think it would be very helpful to the OpenWrt community as a whole to really detail what hard tech the project requires that is absent from current Trunk. For example, the bonding you mention.

I personally encourage anyone to build this on OpenWRT trunk and not the AirOS fork. I don't see a single mention of AirOS on the pages, did I miss it?

The contest, at minimum, is free marketing for OpenWRT. I'd like to see companies add to the prize amount with secondary joins to the contest.

Yes, the router has 16MB of flash memory, just like a SU SLINUX Disk (SSD).

RE: "If you really like CLI and have decent knowledge in networking then give Vyatta a try. No GUI at all."

OpenWRT has "no GUI at all". it is an optional piece when you build the firmware. It has all the settings in /etc/config/ tree. There is a command-line program called UCI that allows you to easily edit them. The GUI's get built on top of that typically.

There are at least 3 installable package GUI's available that I know of: X-WRT, LuCI, Gargoyle. But people have used it for years and years without a GUI.

OpenWRT's is really great at being portable to many routers and CPU types. They spent a lot of time investing in the long-term and not worried about the visual fluff.

I think we should encourage other companies to join in the contest. Best idea I have is solicit router companies to do $25,000 donations - and allow them to independently judge and reward their own winner.

That way maybe someone who didn't make the top place could get a chance at another income boost. Would supplement the interest in people fearful of not making 1st place.

Also note that a single person can enter more than ONE entry - so if they come up with different design cocepts - they don't have to choose.

So why don't the guys who make Tomato port their UI over to OpenWRT and enter it in contest?

Noting wrong with X-WRT, I use it. The OpenWRT developers recently choose LuCI as default for Kamikaze 8.09 release.

I also forgot to mention there are other up to date alternate such as Gargoyle http://www.gargoyle-router.com/ that is GPL license and could be uses as basis for contest entry.

You can view this as fit and finish challenge - but will you win the contest if you put the least effort in?

You guys altered the name to Open-WRT :) Anyway, thanks for spreading the world on this and Kamikaze 8.09 release. the OpenWRT devs work hard.

Other OpenWRT news. The newest Atheros 9xxx radio chips is available in a number of OpenWRT supported routers now. I have been working to help organize new 802.11n support in OpenWRT. I have compiled a list of consumer routers that work with Linux ath9k driver and ar71xx CPU. In order of current recommendation:

Planex (PCI) MZK-W04NU, 32MB RAM and 8MB flash, USB port, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-652BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-632BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
D-Link DIR-615 revision C1 (ONLY!), 32MB of RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
TP-Link TL-WR941N WR941ND, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet

OpenWRT team is pretty close also on the Netgear WNR2000.

These listed above all come from a common Atheros AP81 reference platform. see http://wiki.openwrt.org/AtherosAR9100

In USA and Japan, the Planex is available on Amazon.com for $59.99 with free shipping... it has more flash and USB port. 3 removable antennas, is a nice hacker system. In the USA, the Trendnet routers have been on sale from Newegg, Fry's, buy.com for only $25 a few times. I will try to post on Reddit / my Slashdot journal when I see them on sale for $25 next time.

The ath9k driver for Linux is not yet mature but is moving along... in 2 to 3 months I expect we have a very nice platform... and the router interface and ease of use of OpenWRT is getting attention with this contest! Now is an exciting time for OpenWRT and Linux routers - finally moving to some new N devices.

Other OpenWRT news. The newest Atheros 9xxx radio chips is available in a number of OpenWRT supported routers now. I have been working to help organize new 802.11n support in OpenWRT. I have compiled a list of consumer routers that work with Linux ath9k driver and ar71xx CPU. In order of current recommendation:

Planex (PCI) MZK-W04NU, 32MB RAM and 8MB flash, USB port, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-652BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
Trendnet TEW-632BRP, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
D-Link DIR-615 revision C1 (ONLY!), 32MB of RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet
TP-Link TL-WR941N WR941ND, 32MB RAM and 4MB flash, 10/100 Ethernet

OpenWRT team is pretty close also on the Netgear WNR2000.

In USA and Japan, the Planex is available on Amazon.com for $59.99 with free shipping... it has more flash and USB port. 3 removable antennas, is a nice hacker system. In the USA, the Trendnet routers have been on sale from Newegg, Fry's, buy.com for only $25 a few times. I will try to post on Reddit again when I see them on sale next time.

The ath9k driver for Linux is not yet mature but is moving along... in 2 to 3 months I expect we have a very nice platform... and the router interface and ease of use of OpenWRT is getting attention with this contest! Now is an exciting time for OpenWRT and Linux routers - finally moving to some new N devices.

OpenWRT dev trunk is rather stable, now supports 2.6.27 and 2.6.28 (change a few vars in the makefiles). The toolchain setup is automated and works well. I had no trouble setting up on modern Ubuntu 8.10 x64 host. A lot of embedded dev seems to be inflexible about hosting platform - the makefiles of OpenWRT work well.

Runs well on 8MB of RAM with 4MB flash to boot from.

Supports a variety of target platforms, even x86. Decent package manager, and always looking for additional options.