Yesterday I wrote about Sony competing with the hacking community, in addition to their traditional hardware competitors in the gaming market. It is apparent that Sony has to respond to the large community of modders and hackers not just by making it harder for them to hack the PSP firmware, but compete by adding the features to the firmware that the modding community is adding themselves and thereby disincentivizing the non-hardcore user community from implementing hacks.
Today I read that Linksys is releasing a new line of routers and access points targeting the Linux community. In reality there is little about this "L" line of products that is Linux specific, aside from the fact that the operating system the product line will use will continue to be Linux while the broader product lines will switch to VxWorks. In other words, the L product line is not intended or limited to customers who are using Linux, because the operating system of the router has no effect on what devices are connecting to it. The reason why the L line is significant is that there is a large community of hackers who have extended Linksys' firmware with a wide range of performance and feature add-ons, and IT groups have embraced these add-ons, especially for additional security features, even though the warranties/support are voided.
Linux hackers and hobbyists have long hot-rodded their WRT54Gs, adding features such as Radius authentication, bridge capabilities, VoIP QoS (voice-over-IP quality-of-service), and so on. The L model will continue to offer 4MB of Flash, and 16MB of RAM, in order to support the various freely and commercially available alternative firmware images for the devices that depend on those memory capacities.
So it appears that what Linksys is doing is on one hand moving to a lower cost hardware platform for the broader market while preserving the Linux-based platform for the community of hackers, including those corporate customers who are modding the firmware.
Comments