Hacker News Reader

>It's Open Source

>Price of the Firmware

>The right to use the OpenIPC firmware and its components is granted to all users free of charge and only for personal, non-commercial purposes. If you are interested in using OpenIPC for your business projects, please contact our team.

View on HN

I wonder whether they really want open source, or this is a commercial effort that's trying to leverage 'the community' to get the hard part of the engineering for free.

For really wanting open source, the OpenWrt model has seemed pretty good, and the nature of the engineering work seems similar. Some hardware vendors use OpenWrt for their firmware, which seems to help the mainline open source OpenWrt also have good support for that hardware.

That's confusing, because the GitHub repo has an MIT license. Is there some kind of secret sauce they add to the compiled binaries that the non-commercial clause applies to maybe?

Their "Magestic" app, which sounds like it provides key functionality, is closed source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com