[wsfii-discuss] Re: wsfii-discuss Digest, Vol 10, Issue 1

Fri Dec 2 17:19:14 UTC 2005

As a group, the position is clear: work seriously, be focused in what we 
can do, continue with our healthy growth and stay away of any hype. Time 
to time there has been many initiatives with more or less noise that 
just crashed, typically those things just introduce risk, that also 
applies clearly to fon. No need to link to Fon until gets real and 
clarified.

Personally, I was somewhat involved raising questions to Fon. They were 
using a freeneworks speech it and presenting as a "movimiento" or 
"revolution", a smart millionaire going to invest in free networks with 
a new business model, but after a while and investigating we saw that 
there was no real significant investement, at least yet, just 
replicating what we were already doing (work together with 
municipalities, schools, using "iglesias", bandwidth sharing...) but 
leaving some basic things unexplained and announcing many things like 
they was already something available or going a be in a short time frame 
and coming by their hand, announcements of false partnerships/alliances 
(including us), etc.

We do clearly collaborate with private companies on the basis that the 
network is neutral to them, but open to their investments as long as 
they respect our license. We started to get some success stories on 
that. On the beginning I thought that it can be another interesting 
initiative, but Fon failed clarifying those very basic questions and the 
way they communicate their message, and worst than this, reacted badly, 
attacking us just because we weren't simply embracing them directly, 
trying to patent the bandwidth sharing/redistributing, saying that we 
were radials against private companies (we clearly aren't...) and few 
other dirty things. On the other hand Martin as well as a benefactor to 
his foundations, is also known from becoming a millionaire not for 
driving a company with a real business, he just started them during the 
internet hype, and sold at x100 of current value. Therefore you can 
imagine that many small investors who lost their savings because of the 
internet hype, now still remember those days.

Reality is that fon is still just noise at the blogosphere level. There 
is no a truly open project behind them, just a private company and the 
firmware that they have released and although is openwrt based, turns 
the radio into a hot spot locked into fon as a service provider... They 
have moderated a little bit their message, but still on the same way... 
It hasn't to be that difficult to dialog/clarify those very basic.... 
so... is up to them.

In a summary: No way to have any kind of relationship with Fon until 
things get clear. We have to wait how evolves and keep our eyes on that, 
but wasting more time than necessary on it.

Changing the topic, I was just taking a look at altred. That looks very 
close to what we did at guifi.net for local communities here. I'm also 
able to see that you have used drupal for that. At guifi we wrote a 
module for drupal for supporting this (maps, node and services database, 
monitoring tools, network addresses assignments, automatic 
configurations for some firmwares when is possible...). That's about 
thousands of lines of code and more than a year of development. It's 
still Catalan but has to be quite easy to translate to Spanish if you 
wish, so count with us if you want to setup that for altred.

Ramon.

En/na kdag ha escrit:

>hola ramon, hola lista.
>
>yea i wanted to share our renewed website..its our 2 years old project
>in medellin colombia that evolved into something called altred
>(national scope gathering the different project from the country)
>
>Ramon, i will like to understand better your group's position towards
>a project like FON, in colombia im sure this will be replicated soon
>and theres some unrest and of course fears from some members of our
>growing projects (scattered nodes some linked via OLSR). Im trully
>inviting your feedback in a very informal way, maybe more in a
>conceptual than a technical approach (it that can be dissasociate, i
>doubt so) since i know guifi net has developed a strong structure that
>allows growing and that can whitstand something like FON...yea i will
>be interested in using it as a model down south.
>
>oke, here the link of our project:
>http://www.medellinwireless.net/
>
>buen finde,
>/alejo
>
>
>
>On 12/1/05, wsfii-discuss-request at lists.okfn.org
><wsfii-discuss-request at lists.okfn.org> wrote:
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>>Today's Topics:
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>>   1. Hi from guifi.net (Ramon Roca)
>>
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>>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>Message: 1
>>Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 23:51:00 +0100
>>From: Ramon Roca <ramon.roca at guifi.net>
>>Subject: [wsfii-discuss] Hi from guifi.net
>>To: wsfii-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>>Message-ID: <438E2CD4.4050700 at guifi.net>
>>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>
>>
>>I'm new on this list, I just heard from it through a king email from
>>Julian Priest, and want to say hi.
>>
>>I'm involved in guifi.net (http://guifi.net) which is a non-profit
>>organization that helps to variety local communities to build wireless
>>networks.
>>I've just been browsing wsfii and I do identify clearly same objectives,
>>so count us for strengthening the free networks ;)
>>
>>
>>
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>>End of wsfii-discuss Digest, Vol 10, Issue 1
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