Slashdot Mirror
From "Happy Hacking" to "Screw You"
tquid writes "Trying to bridge the digital divide in Canada's poorest postal code, a principled group of hackers adopt "open source"-based technology spun off from an MIT project. Then the terms on the hardware are changed, and changed again, and then firmware to lock out the frustrated group's software is installed, screwing them out of their investment and many hours of development work."
Wasn't this was originally developed as an open source project at MIT? I imagine their original agreement with MIT probably precluded this very thing (locking it down). If not, I would be very disappointed with MIT.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So why not talk to Meraki and see if you can work something out rather than whining about it on your blog?
How does a EULA apply to hardware? Unless they're leasing the hardware there's no license involved.
until I read this article. My building is going condo and I am considering bringing up the concept of a building wide wireless network at our first board meeting. I am even toying with the idea of sharing with the neighboring buildings. The only commercial product I have been able to find is Meraki. Does anybody have any other suggestions?
Please forgive my English, it's Monday.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Dan Rather did a recent profile of this neighborhood on his "Dan Rather Reports" show on HDNET. I never know such places existed in Canada, but there are bad neighborhoods everywhere I guess. Still, I've seen a lot worse in the U.S. I used to live near East St. Louis, and that place was more like a shelled-out DMZ than a town.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
It depends on the original EULA that they obtained the hardware/software under. Under the original license under which they obtained the hardware there was no "you cannot hack this" clause, now if the original EULA has a clause about "we can update this EULA at any time and the changes will be applied retroactively", and a court buys that that is a legally binding term (I can't believe it would, because what is to stop any proprietary company from getting a huge installed base by giving something away, and then changing the EULA and saying "oh, to continue using this software, you now owe us $1000"). If those 2 things are true (the original EULA has that clause, and a court allows them to retroactively apply additional restrictions), then it is not illegal. If either of those is false, then it is. They purchased the hardware under the original EULA which permitted changing firmware. The company cannot retroactively apply a new EULA with more restrictive terms to hardware that has already been purchased I don't think, unless a court can be convinced that you can change a contract mid stream. Again if they can, it would allow all sorts of shenanigans by proprietary vendors, heck even open source developers could apply this to GPL'd software and retroactively "revoke" the license.
Fon has also tried to lock out hackers from their hardware - although the moment they sell it, it's not their hardware anymore. There are still some hacks that work and give you SSH access, check my website about it. Although my latest hack ("kolofonium") does not work with the latest firmware, there are still many systems using it: http://stefans.datenbruch.de/lafonera/kolofonium-chart.png So you can guess how many of the sold FON spots may still be active; FON managed to alienate many advanced users that wished to participate but were locked out of their routers.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Your claim that they are taking a loss at $50/unit doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, if that's true, then why is it that the open-mesh guys are able to sell an identical unit for $50? The problem isn't that they were taking a loss - it's that they weren't making enough profit. Secondly, consider Linksys routers. You can routinely buy these for $50 a pop, and they contain a lot more hardware than the Meraki. If Linksys is making a decent living in this business, why can't Meraki?
The bottom line is that Meraki has a losing business plan, and that's why we're seeing all this thrashing. There's no way they can make money fast enough to satisfy their investors at $50/pop, they need to monetize their dashboard system, they need ads, and that's just not what most end-users want. All of this stupid price model tweaking stuff they're doing is almost certainly motivated by promises they made to investors that they subsequently couldn't keep.
If they are in fact poisoning the firmware (I have two Meraki minis, but haven't had a chance to confirm that their firmware is poisoned), I'm pretty sure this is a felony, but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to prove it and fix it. Given that the open mesh boxes are $50 each, I can just buy two and replace the two Merakis I bought as a test project, and I'll come out ahead. It's too bad for the people who bought hundreds or thousands of these devices, though. For them, it might be worth consulting a lawyer.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I hope you'll forgive me for gently tweaking you on the Markets Are Always Your Friend! speech, but your assertion that "If it were a one way street, SCO would still be in business" is highly amusing. You should know, of course, that SCO is in fact still in business, and has recently been tendered a buyout offer by a private equity firm that claims to be willing to pump up to $100M into the company.
Markets with rational actors may function perfectly, but markets rarely provide everyone with sufficient information to act rationally -- and something that tends to be ignored by much "textbook economy talk" is how often it can be in one actor's best interest to try to prevent other actors from obtaining sufficient information to make informed choices. Consumers benefit from a wide choice of producers, but producers benefit from consumers only being able to choose their product.
It's easy to talk about "two way streets," but very often our business transactions aren't that at all: the companies we buy from set all the terms of our sales, and as consumers, our only option is to accept their terms or walk away. (For many workers, this is true of employment contracts, too.) In the case of this article's subject, Meraki essentially changed the terms after the sale, making actual changes to the router which changed the viability of the "micro-ISP" business model they were explicitly selling their product for. If it was truly a "two way street," it wouldn't have been in Meraki's self-interest to screw a percentage of their customers -- the conditions that allowed them to make that business decision include the difficulty in their customers switching to another competing service. And despite what the Big Golden Book of Economics might suggest, this is not some kind of strange and wild condition like nothing we've ever seen before in the business world.