[walrus01]

I'm sharing some harsh reality with them: The ISP market in NYC is highly competitive. If they want to be serious about it, it's not going to work as a nonprofit. I'm trying to tell them bluntly about what sort of infrastructure their competitors operate so that they can get an idea of the actual capital expenditure requirements involved in architecting/engineering a MAN-scale, five nines ISP composed of point to point wireless links.

[ixiebosoeb]

Once upon a time there was a company called Microsoft. They hated free software! It costs millions to write an OS! Why is it free?? They hated the free guys so much. Then the free software got better. It got so much better than what you would have to pay for from Microsoft! Eventually Microsoft said oh well, and built the free software into their product. They even contributed back to that free software and everyone learned that you can have free and paid and as long as we all contribute the world is a better place. Thank you.

[neuromantik8086]

Once upon a time there was a chipmaker named Intel. Sun decided to open source its SPARC architecture. Other folks tried to design their own FOSS CPU architectures. Intel still dominates.

FOSS zealots like to point to the success of Linux over Windows (which is restricted to the server market, I might add), but there's little evidence that the FOSS philosophy is effective when it comes to physical infrastructure. Software requires bytes and labor. Bytes are cheap and labor can be donated or paid for by companies. Hardware requires fabs and factories, which are expensive.

[master-litty]

The reality is harsh but the discussion doesn't have to be.

[stale2002]

Well it seems to be working fine for them right now.

So I guess the points you brought up don't matter.