[GNUz] Re: The Future of Community Wireless

[Neil Stockbridge]

> The problem is that there is no incentive for it becasue there is no
>  content. The average person says "What do I get for sharing my
>  bandwidth?". The answer is, not a bloody lot. In exchange for being
>  able to get distros X,Y,Z from you I supply distro W to all of you.
>  BUT I am kinda expected to keep my mirror of distro W up to date. No
>  mean feat.

what if there were enough people interested in keeping W up to date that
it would be possible to share the load of doing so?  and if people are
attracted to that then the load per person will decrease over time.

also, there are OSes that i would try out if i didn't have to install
them: http://www.oszoo.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page but a gigabyte of
Qemu hard disc is a bit much for me to download over Xtra just for fun.
there are a few 500 MB Debian Sarge and OpenBSD 3.9 Qemu hard disc
images here that could be shared but i'm not going to share them via
Xtra and its bandwidth cap.  live CDs lend themselves to being shared
this way too.

what i'm really looking forward to is frivolous data, like using a VNC
session to a machine on the other side of Christchurch instead of an SSH
session and like leaving a web cam feed open 24 hours a day.  even if
the bandwidth available is modest, it's not charged by the byte.

- neil