> So people could have made their drives secure after EOL.
A very, very, very select few with the necessary skills could have. This is a mass-market device, if 1 in 10 000 buyers is able to do this, that'd be a lot, and then those would have a Linux machine on an ancient SoC with none of the original functionality.
So? The code is available, which is what the parent commenter wanted. Getting something FOSS running using something that's already supported in mainline Linux is a week long project, perhaps, if you suffer with outdated U-Boot. You can still download the code for this device even on WD's website. (That's quite something, because typically companies start violating the GPL shortly after the device stops being sold, or when they get acquired and redesign their website)
This one would probably be harder, because there's not a ton of 32bit ppc distros around, and the storage is limited, so you'd have to setup some toolchain and build some ppc basis for the userspace, yourself.
I don't think many people would root for some 11 year old WD's trashy userspace code, and would rather want to run current musl, busybox and samba on this, or whatever.
Someone who likes these devices could have done the work and could have published it for others.
A very, very, very select few with the necessary skills could have. This is a mass-market device, if 1 in 10 000 buyers is able to do this, that'd be a lot, and then those would have a Linux machine on an ancient SoC with none of the original functionality.