@lanodan @monnier @frogzone >it's a special system to support hardware that's made difficult to hack on
You just ssh in and then you can do whatever computation you want, maybe plugging in a flash drive to get more storage or swap if needed?

>quite like modern Apple hardware or Android smartphones if you want something painfully obvious.
Unlike modern apple hardware or Android smartphones, such devices run with 100% free software and do not contain any digital handcuffs to restrict what you run.

>it doesn't even matter what software you run on them because they're less computer than a programmable calculator.
Well, there it is - it doesn't matter if software running on a computer that happens to be most useful for routing is free or proprietary eh?

They're computers, although they only really have a inconvenient UART shell for display, although that doesn't matter as you can just ssh in, install GNU bash and do whatever computation you want.