OpenWrt and LEDE reunite under the OpenWrt name

The OpenWrt and LEDE development teams will continue to develop together under the OpenWrt name. Versions prior to 15.05 of the OpenWrt firmware for routers and embedded devices are losing support.

Developers of both OpenWrt and LEDE, which stands for Linux Embedded Development Environment, will be working on OpenWrt, but building on the code base of LEDE. In addition, the development will fall under the rules that have been drawn up for the LEDE project. For example, the direction of the project will be determined by majority vote. It is not yet known what to do with both forums and wikis. Decisions about a possible merger have yet to be made.

Old OpenWrt CC releases from before 15.05 will no longer be supported in the new format and security updates or bug fixes will no longer appear for these versions. For OpenWrt CC 15.05 itself, which came out in September 2015, support will be limited.

LEDE 17.01, on the other hand, retains full support with security and bug fixes, both for source code and binary releases. The first release from the joint development teams should follow in the coming months.

LEDE was created in May 2016 as a fork out of dissatisfaction of a group of OpenWrt developers with the internal state of affairs. Last year the two teams contacted each other again and it was decided to continue together, but it took until early 2018 before the official announcement followed.