CarrierWrt is an OpenWrt overlay that simplifies development of commercial products by focusing on aspects that are important to equipment vendors and their customers:
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CarrierWrt's build configuration is versioned, i.e. there is no "menuconfig" build target. If you build from the same source you will (or should) end up with the same firmware.
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CarrierWrt is designed to produce complete firmware that can be put through QA and is usable out of the box. While it is possible to postinstall packages the end-user should not have to. In a sense you can think of CarrierWrt as the cathedral built on top of OpenWrt, the bazar.
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OpenWrt traditionally stays very close to the bleeding edge of open source, even on the release branches (e.g. backfire). CarrierWrt is much more conservatively maintained. We try to fix bugs with minimal patches instead of updating to the latest snapshots.
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Proprietary closed source software is usually not welcomed into open source respositories with open arms. Nevertheless equipment vendors often need to add some bells and whistles to differentiate their products. CarrierWrt is designed to make it easy to integrate proprietary software, and even comes with some functionality essential to carrier customers pre-integrated.
In short, if you want to build a commercial product based on OpenWrt you should clone CarrierWrt! It embodies wisdom from years of experience with "branching OpenWrt" and developing commercial products, and will serve as an excellent starting point for yours.
You need to have installed git, svn, gcc, binutils, patch, bzip2, flex, make, gettext, pkg-config, unzip, libz-dev, libncurses-dev, gawk and libc headers. For example, on a Debian based system run the command:
apt-get install -y git subversion gcc binutils patch bzip2 flex make gettext
pkg-config unzip libz-dev libncurses-dev gawk gcc-multilib
Then:
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cd carrierwrt && make
Basic build configuration in config.mk. Functionality and default settings are controlled through what we call "product profiles" in products/.mk. Target specific build configurations are in targets/.mk.
Next step is to clone this repository and get started making changes!
The CarrierWrt build system overlay is licensed under a highly permissive "1-clause BSD license". See the LICENSE file for more details.
The OpenWrt build system, as well as the software built by the build system, is licensed separately under their own licenses.