I think the second outcome is pretty much impossible. The device will be built and sold by BananaPi, which receives a license to the OpenWrt trademark in exchange for a $5-$10 donation per device sold.
The OpenWrt project does not pay its developers, so the money will only be used to cover infrastructure costs.
As an OpenWRT user, I am very optimistic about this. I'm sure almost all users would fork in money for this instead of going for hostile mainstream companies.
Also the USB-C UART and recovery read-only bootloader is a nice touch. Really looking forward to it.
One concern is just misplaced anger because some users misunderstand what this means for OpenWRT going forward, but I hope they'll be in the minority.
> The OpenWrt project does not pay its developers,
This is actually surprising to me, but I guess the donation money isn't enough to pay developers. Would the surplus if infrastructure costs are covered go to developers or is it all going to a rainy day fund?
Maybe that money could be used for meet-up events and other activities that benefit the project and indirectly its contributors. That seems like a safe way to spend money without getting into trouble for paying some and not others, risking the open-source spirit of the project.
Yeah, it's probably not a great idea to pay developers with the donation money. I am not sure why I thought it was acceptable, but it is obvious now why this is a terrible idea.
Prolific devs could setup a Patreon/Librepay if they'd like, but that opens up its own can of worms like false expectations/entitlement of some donators. They might prefer not to do that for that reason alone.
Infrastructure costs for a project like openwrt could be nearly zero if the infrastructure was designed with cost in mind (site behind cloudflare, free tier in Aws/Google cloud for build bots, code on GitHub, etc).
You can probably run the whole thing for $100/year of unavoidable costs (eg. Domain registration).
Also did CI/CD on OSS projects and highly agree with this - CI/CD is not free, especially if it involves anything hardware related, which is likely in at least some subset of OpenWRT's cases.
