Number of active core developers at an all time low, no process for getting more new people involved.
Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by internal disagreements and single points of failure.
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.
Not enough people with commit access to handle the incoming flow of patches, too little attention to testing and regular builds.
Lack of focus on stability and documentation.[Edit:] Since I am getting downvoted let me get through their stated reasons:
Number of active core developers at an all time low,
no process for getting more new people involved.
Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by
internal disagreements and single points of failure.
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.
Not enough people with commit access to handle
the incoming flow of patches, too little
attention to testing and regular builds.
Lack of focus on stability and documentation.
Apart from the "internal disagreement" argument all of these arguments may be pain points but are not really arguments for forking the project, some are orthogonal some are actually arguments against a fork. So I wish them the best, but from the outside this fork does not look promising.
How many system-level developers do you know who'd throw themselves into creating a new project, hashing out the governance, etc unless the alternative was even worse? I know, roughly, none.
I'm an OpenWRT user, not a developer, and it seemed pretty clear, even from that distance, that there was something broken given the way infrastructure problems were (or weren't) dealt with earlier this year.
I recognize many of the developers committed to the new project, and my understanding from others is that the new project includes many of the most active OpenWRT developers.
Clearly it would be better if they didn't feel this fork was necessary, but for now, I think this fork is promising.
There is some discussion starting around 1230. My reading is that they thought that the OpenWPT reputation re: development matters was poor.
The last couple of OpenWRT releases have moved fast, in the future OpenWRT could move closer to the cutting edge without the pressure of users who want long term stability?
"LEDE is also an alternation of the phrase to lead, describing an introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story."