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Wireless Hotspot Creation?
ezodon asks: "I have been tasked by management to submit a plan on creating a wireless hot-spot in several of our locations. Management would like to be able to charge for the wireless access from our customers. Because of the desire to charge, I have not been able to find any Open Source software, and just a few commercial offerings. I have checked out PublicIP and LessNetworks wireless management software, but neither has a direct billing option. We already have a merchant account and credit card machines at all of our locations. Can anyone in Slashdot land give me some recommendations on how to get this done?"
---Well, he's also asking a large group of people who are more likely to be using a paid service and have experiences with the user end and/or be admins for pay-per-play wifi companies.
DO you think media companies hand out demographic data for free? Or do consulters give free, and good, advice?
If you do something for free, many, many people will be willing to help you one way or another. Hence why the GNU and similar licenses get off the ground: Socialism.
"If you might, even in the most remote sense, help me, I'll help you to further our goals." is the basis of how Socialism can work. For information (code and intelligence), there is no real "price" on the words. There are for tangible objects, but not virtualized abstracts. In terms of Open Source, information is seen as "equal": equal in value.
Simply put, this project can be done in Open Source, though I'd have to think about implementing a timer with my ideal setup (for billing purposes). Ask yourself this.. Is it worth your time trying to figure out open source if it can do this, or Pay a consultant, or buy commerical hardware/software and hope for the best?
Free radius, step 1
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
what exactly is your business? How much are you planning to charge. In the long run it may cost you more to keep the pay system running than you actually make in revenue from the system. For example, I'm sure if starbucks could force you to buy something in order to use the wireless internet access they would, but they would probably lose more money in wasting employee time and printing receipts and creating a ticket system etc. than they would actually gain from the few people who just mooch off the system. Yeah, there are going to be those people, but if your business offers a good enough product, most people who want to use the internet will probably end up patrons as well.
I find it ironic that many penny pinchers actually waste more money penny pinching than they would by being a little more free with their money.
Monstar L
Open Source and even Free as in Beer software is NOT socialism
Actually, it is. Socialism is (according to your Econ 101 textbook) where the people own the means of production. What is Free Software if not that?
More accurately (but less in line with first year econ), socialism is gearing society (government, economics, etc) towards enabling everyone (not to make them equal, as many detractors would argue, just to help provide equal opportunity and prevent the few from ruining things for the rest of us, more or less). Again, this is exactly what the Free Software movement is about.
This is just a guess, and if it doesn't apply to you, maybe it'll apply to someone reading this. You sound like you might think "Socialism" a bad word due to indoctrination (in the US, specifically) or seeing what happens when you apply Socialism under a dictatorship (USSR, China). I suggest that a proper society (the kind the USA was a wonderful attempt at) requires a balance of Capitalism, Democracy, and Socialism. Right now we're putting all our resources into Capitalism, and starving the Democratic and Socialist needs of the nation. This has given us a strong GDP and immense military power, but lead to many backwards metrics like the largest prison population of any nation, poor healthcare coverage, sub-par education, etc. I truly doubt the key is to become a Socialist nation, but I *am* certain it requires not being afraid of doing things that need to be done just because these things are Socialist.