Neat! I hope it has has the other power-user options, like detailed traffic-shaping, common to other third-party router firmware like Tomato.
Yes!
How about enabling a peer-to-peer version of the web?
Who needs ISPs now? We can crowdfund a wireless alternative.
Which will quickly degrade from an “egalitarian” peer-to-peer into a current system resembling scale-free network, with only a few nodes carrying most of the load and the rest being only weakly connected. A natural evolution.
That said, it still may be a better alternative to the status quo, if the growth is properly managed and the accretion of connectivity to only a few nodes that would then have too much overall control/power is inhibited enough to not cause significant problems.
For wireless, given how much the spectrum is clogged, we may have to wait a little bit more for the wider emergence of smart antennas, antenna arrays that maintain directivity by phase-shifting signal from/to them (like the electronic-scanning radars do). Until then, interference galore…
If such a thing was organised along anarchist rather than capitalist lines, it couldn’t help but be superior.
Depends. Has a great chance though. But even the best conceived systems may have inherent failure modes; in networks, the winner-takes-all mode tends to be favored (similar to formation of water erosion lines and rivers, another example of self-forming hierarchies). Be aware of such things, plan for them, and they won’t become a show-stopper.
And some little silliness, along the lines of the “Free Electric Band” song:
There’s a telco in our city, they have got a business plan,
Because they are no charity, they gouge us as they can.
They got just one competitor, the cable TV net
Two’s a little better than one but that’s all that we can get.
My options were selected when they laid the cables down,
DSL or a cable, no more choices in this town.
My future in that system was lobbied for and planned,
But I gave it up for WiFi and the free ISM band.
(sorry it is not complete, I ran out of inspiration.)
I figure if you try to arrange a complex organisation in a way that mimics nature’s methods, you at least stand a chance; complex stuff in nature operates on a bottom-up basis, not top-down, so…
…and often forms similar structures. Which is a caveat that can grow into a gotcha if not planned for. Otherwise I pretty much agree.
Yeah - hands-off idealism is demented.
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