[Freedombox-discuss] towards a business plan

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Yannick <sevmek at free.fr> wrote:

>
> * blogging
> In the same way if we plan to put some service for blogging, like a web
> server e.g. Nginx+php/mysql support, with a nice tool to start your own
> blog e.g. wordpress, what if your ISP provider puts you behind a NAT for
> the port 80? How will people be able to read your blog? One solution is
> mesh wifi, i.e. everybody being a provider. It will probably need some
> engineering.
>

This is exactly the problem I am working on, with PageKite (
https://pagekite.net/ ). We hope to have official Debian packages ready
within the next couple of months.

You touched on this and also e-mail, both of which are areas where
FreedomBoxes can be assumed to need some "help" from the cloud if they are
to provide self-hosted services which are backwards compatible and
interoperable with today's Internet.

PageKite is really, really easy to use to make a self-hosted website visible
to the outside world (circumventing NAT and all that other nasty stuff), but
it is so because there is a business (my company) behind it providing
in-the-cloud infrastructure. I believe that for the FreedomBox to scale to
thousands or millions of end users, such support businesses will need to
exist, and at some point we'll want to have a discussion about what they
should look like: how must companies behave in order to be "Freedom and
FreedomBox compatible"? :-)

Of course, some will just reject commercial involvement entirely... but not
all, and I think some of those 1000s of small businesses will be providing
on-line support services to FreedomBoxes, and we don't want them to become
freedom inhibitors either.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

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