Instead of trying to fight to make big corporations and governments play nice on the Internet, this project tries to allow individuals & small & medium businesses to be good/model citizens. This is a grass-roots attempt to create a shareable electronic freedom: not only ought you have the right to privacy and expression, but sensibly, you ought have the means to share and spread that right too.

Two previous explanations:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/open-wireless-movement https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/why-we-have-open-wirel...

I hope to go into more detail about this elsewhere, but to me anonymity is a key point -- existing telecommunications infrastructure is very hostile to anonymity, both in its authentication and payment models. Open wireless networks at cafés, libraries, and so on are already much friendlier to anonymity. Broadening the availability of this kind of infrastructure could be helpful to making anonymity a practical default, at least for some applications.

(I work at EFF and have contributed to this project, but wasn't responsible for EFF's adoption of it.)

Edit: My colleague Yan Zhu and I have also been looking at the question of transparency in software development, including deterministic and reproducible builds as well as update mechanisms that make it hard for the software publisher to target users with malware. I think this project also makes for a good testbed for how transparent we can make software development and distribution. One thing that I did on the initial release of this project is making it get update manifests over Tor so that EFF can't distinguish particular users when serving them update images. I think Ranga spoke about this in his talk at HOPE, and I think it's something EFF will continue working on quite a bit.

This is wild speculation, but when I read the announcement I figured that they're planning to provide the firmware and software for free, while selling fully-assembled hardware pre-loaded with the stack. Can't always rely on donations alone.

I could quite easily be wrong, but without money in the equation, I feel like it would make more sense for them to work with OpenWRT rather than fork it.