Linksys WRT54G
The blue-and-black box that put Wi-Fi in the living room. Cheap, everywhere, and secretly running Linux — which one mailing-list post in 2003 turned into an open-source legend that outlived the router itself.
Linksys started as a garage company: Janie and Victor Tsao, immigrants from Taiwan, founded it in Irvine, California, in 1988 to sell printer sharers, then network cards, then in the late 1990s the first affordable multiport router. Its first Wi-Fi router came in 2001, and the WRT54G followed in December 2002: 802.11g wireless, a four-port switch plus an Internet port, two screw-on antennas, and a blue-and-black case that became a fixture of the home network. By the time Cisco bought Linksys in 2003, the company had 305 employees and more than $500 million in revenue.
In May and June 2003 a Linux user named Andrew Miklas posted to the Linux kernel mailing list that the WRT54G was running Linux, that the GPL obliged Linksys to publish the source, and that his emails to the company had gone unanswered. Linksys called the omission an isolated mistake, and by July the news site Slashdot reported it had "caved to community pressure" and released code; in October the Linux weekly LWN found the kernel tarball still incomplete, with the Free Software Foundation handling the case. The Foundation later sued Cisco for copyright infringement, and the suit was settled. Out of that source grew DD-WRT, Tomato and OpenWrt, third-party firmware that turned a cheap home router into a hobbyist platform.
Then Linksys broke the magic. Version 5 of the WRT54G cut the flash memory to 2 MB and swapped Linux for VxWorks, too small for the community firmware. The answer, in 2005, was the WRT54GL — the "L" allegedly standing for Linux — a reissue of the version-4 hardware that would later be billed as the best-selling router of all time. The family sprawled into a GS with "SpeedBooster," a three-antenna "Pre-N" GX and a Vonage model with phone jacks, and in 2013 Cisco sold Linksys to Belkin.
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