Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.

But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.

You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.

To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)