One fascinating sidebar in the WRT54G history was the Fon [0] "Fonera" project, which was one of the reasons I bought WRT54G specifically. (Which I found in a box just recently, Fon stickers beside it.) Fon had the idea of trying to build a network of independent residential wifi that users could share roaming among each other. It was a paid wifi network, so people that had a Fonera AP at home could opt for either free access wherever they went as benefit of running an AP or a simple profit sharing option (but then they'd pay for their own roaming).
The original Fonera projects were all built on top of OpenWRT.
It was cute idea for trying to make guest-accessible wifi ubiquitous. It ran up against shifts in law in some countries making network AP owners more personally responsible for accesses to their wifi. Also, it never really hit network effects that the scale mattered. I ran a Fonera AP through a large chunk of college/grad school and can't say that I ever saw another AP in the wild to take advantage of the free roaming (and if I had it switched to the profit-sharing mode I never would have seen a dime).
Fon pivoted entirely out of the Fonera residential wifi project in 2016. It was a neat idea, but it didn't survive.