There is a new wireless daemon for Linux called iwd, developed by Intel to be an alternative to wpa_supplicant. It is meant to be more lightweight, e.g. to run on embedded devices. Also, I think it should be more consistent in its view of the wireless network status, as I learned in the talk at the "All Systems Go" conference.

I just checked out and compiled the code: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/wireless/iwd.git/about/
It's released under LGPL.