Re: Activity?

Hey,

what they have in common (muniwireless, meraki, open-mesh.com etc) is, that 
they tend to make the network itself a private/owned resource. Something an 
individual or an group of people owns. Hence they fail for the critical 
mission: to build "street like" infrastructure, where you can reach 
different "stores" to buy your services from whatever entitity (if it's not 
entirely free already). Example: there should be more than one host offering 
OpenVPN for international connections or so.

Typical keywords in "support queries" which reach my mail account from time to 
time: We need to "control", "register", "encrypt". They cannot rely on or do 
not understand concepts like "sharing", "commons", "community". And - e.g. 
the merkaki folks simply charge too much for their registration 
service/software ;-)

Having such closed concepts in mind, it is _not_ easy for any other individual 
to jump in and join. Hence you will fail to reach the critial user count nor 
do you bind the necessary altruism - wich _is_ out there. What's also sad: 
this uses up the spectrum originally meant to be free and commons. 

There are examples of running open meshes. I live in one called freifunk and I 
dont pay for inet currently (while I need to do some work to get that thing 
up and running - but that's another story). And yes - there are plenty of 
in-between implementations (in-between: closed and open) as this is real 
live - but you need to start with a more extreme position otherwise you have 
nothing for later negotiations <ggg>

// Sven-Ola

Am Mittwoch 06 August 2008 03:29:43 schrieb Tom Sparks:
[snip]
>
> yea :)
> someone with my thinking
> I am proposing something like this to my
> local/regional council :)
>
> Why should I pay AU$40 (and have a 12/36 months
> contract) to get on the
> Internet to view the local/regional websites for my
> area?
>
> I still think there needs to be a cost if you are
> accessing
> international websites
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