[Freedombox-discuss] Roadmap proposal

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson bre at pagekite.net
Thu Feb 17 20:58:43 UTC 2011


Oops, I sent the following reply to James personally, not the list.
Resending!

James he followed up as well, I expect he'll resend to the list if he meant
it to be public as well. :-)


2011/2/17 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <bre at pagekite.net>

> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 2:29 PM, James Vasile <james at hackervisions.org>wrote:
>
>>
>> The bottom of the stack is routing.  If the Plug is your router, it can
>> do many things for you easily, even automatically.  If it is not your
>> router, it can't do anything without a lot of idiosyncratic setup.
>>
>> So if we are starting at the beginning, we need a device that can
>> replace people's routers and then we can layer on the freedom bits.
>>
>
> This is part of the requirements discussion. You are making a lot of
> assumptions, based on your particular vision for not only what a Freedombox
> is, but how your particular vision "should" be built.
>
> I think it would be very unfortunate if we came up with some sort of
> "roadmap" which precludes people working in parallel on the application
> layer stuff, because they have to wait for some low level hardware and
> networking stuff to get done.
>
> Incidentally, you are describing a device that I personally could not use,
> because my ISP provides me with a router and won't let me change or replace
> it. Unless of course you just mean a device which I configure as "default
> gateway", which then passes traffic on to my *real* router... but even that
> should not be a strict requirement.
>
> Assuming you can replace people's routers is wrong IMO. It implies a few
> things:
>
>    1. Your ISP will let you (not always the case)
>    2. Your primary Internet connection is some fixed line (not, say, a 3G
> dongle)
>    3. Only one FreedomBox per household.
>
> Of these, I think 3 is a real show-stopper.
>
> This is of course just my opinion - my personal vision is a slightly more
> generically useful FreedomBox: a personal server which I plug it in wherever
> I am, give it *some* sort of Internet connection and it automagically
> figures out the rest. It takes care of my social networking, hosts my
> personal web-sites, stores my e-mail, coordinates p2p back-ups, runs my
> Seeks or YaCy node, ...
>
> Obviously some features would only be available if I use it as a router,
> but looking at the list of goals at
> http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/goals/ , most of them (not all, but
> most) could certainly be achieved with the FreedomBox serving a less central
> role in the local network topology. So making that a hard requirement would
> seem like a really bad move to me.
>
>
-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
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