Linuxcare Founders Go Wireless

LinuxCare founders Dave Sifry, Art Tyde and Dave LaDuke have started their second company: Sputnik. Basically, they have an ISO you can download that will turn a laptop with an 802.11b card into a wireless gateway. They also wrote a user-authentication scheme that reroutes all traffic to the gateway until the user logs in via a web form. This should sound familiar to people who stay in broadband capable hotels a lot. Using this authentication technique, the software allows you to choose who can and cannot use your gateway, and in you'll be able to charge strangers for access (with Sputnik handling the billing). This will likely get some isps a wee bit upset. NewsForge has an article detailing what they are doing. Update: Turns out the authentication wasn't written by Sputnik, my bad. They use NoCatAuth Disclaimer: I've known these guys for a long time and am pals with them, so I waited until someone else (in this case Grant at NewsForge and the NYT) put something up independently about them before linking to them.

Comments

Re:business model?

[grantus]

In the story, the Linuxcare founders talk about also selling a partly proprietary version of this software to large companies. Basically, same concept with several more security add-ons to sell to corporations worried about firewalling their data away from other wireless users.

Is that enough of a business model to support a cool project? To me, it makes as much sense as most Open Source business models, but only time will decide.

Grant
NewsForge

Why I think This is good .

[modipodio]

For quite some time a trend has been worrying me.That trend is the internet turning into tv .I have always believed that How this phenomenon would occur is through a massive centralisation of isps.How I believed this centralisation would happen was through people like aol/time warner and sony who would start selling large chunks of there content ,(movies games tv/whatever),bundeled
with net access and offered exclusively to there customers and that this would lead over time to people thinking about the internet along the same lines as tv and not as something new .I also believed that to compete the small isps would have to buy the rights to the content of big content companies and accept all of the strings that these content companies should choose to attach and hence that the internet would be controlled by about 5 ,(probably less),big isps.

This story makes me a little more optimistic that the whole internet wiil = tv phenomenon does not have to happen.I also think that this would if adapted by alot of people make the internet alot harder to control and more competitive in terms of pricing .Also the whole concept of selling off ones bandwith to to help pay for the connection appeals to me ,as it stands over here in ireland monthly net connections for dsl are way way to much for me to afford and the prospect of selling on some of the bandwith which I would not be using is very appealing to me, If something like this existed over here i would support it.

The only doughts I have about all of this is that
a),it will not make money and b) eventualy some big company will take over and subvert the whole thing to its own ends .All in all thow I am very interested to see how this goes.It reminds me in some ways of a co-op only for bandwith.