It’s a good question. You probably pay $20-$70 per month for your ADSL broadband connection - somewhere around 512kbps to 12mbps (if you’re lucky enough to have ADSL2). You’ve probably got a download allowance of 5-30 gig. You may have a wireless router but it’s set up so only you can use it - using WEP encryption; you may not even broadcast your SSID. You pay for it, so why would you share it with other people?
Let’s look at something that happened several decades ago, starting in 1983 with the Free software movement and the creation of the GNU Project by Richard Stallman … which later in 1998 evolved into Open Source Software.
When Richard started this project he said “I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free” [source].
Nice - free software! That’s great for us … but why did he think people and particularly programmers would be interested in helping him in this mission? Why would people give up their own time without the payment they would receive developing proprietary commercial software? He believed that the commercialisation of software was breaking up the programmer community and was denying developers opportunities to interact with each other, to share … that it was removing the sense of community from the industry. He believed that this was so important that people would be willing to give up their time to bring this back.
And you know what? He was right. Because of that movement you can now buy your EEE PC for $500 because it’s running an open source operating system. Because of that movement Mozilla Firefox now represents 37% of the browser usage as at January 2008. You may use Internet Explorer still, but I believe it was the Mozilla project that has led the way and brought Microsoft back into line with supporting standards with the development of IE7. If you have a blog it’s probably running PHP and MySQL on Apache - all open source and free. You probably have several applications on your computer, even if you’re running Windows, that are open source.
Yet what have YOU contributed to this movement?
If you’re not a programmer, probably nothing. Yet the programmers who have given in some cases thousands of hours of their time into developing these desktop and web-based applications have done it for the community because they value that more than commercial remuneration.
Now we’re here in 2008 and we’re trying to get people involved in this wireless mesh network project - to open up their wireless networks at home, plug in a Meraki and let other people use your Internet connection.
This time we’re not calling for experience C++ programmers with computer science degrees to help develop the next Internet browser or next free operating system. We’re simply asking you take one of these wireless router devices and plug it into your network, to give something back to the community.
So what’s in it for you? You won’t make money out of this, no - but you will be doing something good. We’re only talking about sharing Internet here … but it’s a step away from the isolation of living in a house in a street of strangers. You will meet new people - people in your own street, in your own local community that you know you should already have introduced yourself to. I don’t want to get all touchy-feely with this post, but if thousands of people got on-board with the open source software movement there must be some value in it that means more to them than being paid.
The value of the dollar may fluctuate, the economy may go in recession … money is not everything. I encourage you to get involved in this project, get involved with your community, meet your neighbours! Drop me an email and I’ll be happy to help you come on-board.