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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?
I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology. One of the most successful early projects, and one that I followed with a great deal of interest was MIT's Roofnet project - an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus.
In 2006 a spin-off company named Meraki was formed to develop and commercialize the MIT Roofnet technology. At the time I was on the board of the Vancouver Community Network and had been championing more development of wireless technology. We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks. We decided that this cost was prohibitive for our purposes and the Merakis were shelved.
In September of 2007 I heard about a group of Vancouver community wifi enthusiasts who were getting together with the goal of setting up community wifi in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. I came out to a meeting and invited along some people whom I know are interested in any project that is about bridging the digital divide. The technology that was trumpeted at that meeting was Meraki. Since my previous brush with them they had changed their pricing structure and now they would let you run a free network (with free access to their dashboard) or a subscription (paid) network for 10% of your charges. We (the group, which came to call itself " FreeTheNet ") were unanimous that the free option was what we wanted to do and we quickly began building out a public network.
In October Meraki announced that they were changing their pricing model (yet again) and that they would be vastly raising the costs of their hardware (tripling, in fact). I remember going to their website to learn more about what they were doing and their new marketing slogan was something like "Build your business using exciting new technology where the rules of the game keep changing " How ironic; I wish I'd kept a screenshot of that! Under their new system there was no way that we could build out the network we envisioned. At roughly that point, one of our most experienced hackers said "forget Meraki", we're going to write our own firmware and dashboard and promptly started researching that. By late Novermber he was able to demostrate an open routing firmware called B.A.T.M.A.N. running with a mesh helper inside called Robin, that provided the same functionality as the Meraki firmware. This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging "happy hacking" when you logged into it via the console.
Over December and January he worked on adding features that we wanted to our network to have (and that we had previously been encouraging Meraki to build to improve their system - things like per node custom splash screen, enhancements to the dashboard to improve scalability, etc.) All of this was being tested on Meraki hardware because this is what we had spent our money on back when they supported and encouraged the kind of work we were doing.
Then in February Meraki announced a change to their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) which precluded anyone from changing any of the software that they install on t
Their wiki article has no Controversy section. It needs one. I strongly suggest that someone who was abused by them edit the wiki article setting out the case. Given their hippie like idealistic looking web site, I would have to accuse them of hypocrisy at least.
I talked to Meraki about using their mesh network fro a resort I wanted to equip, but when I asked what would happen to our investment if they went belly up, they told me it the network hardware would be unusable if that happened. I said thanks but that's not acceptable.
Who would walk a client into that sort of scenario? How many bright hopeful startups have we seen disappear without a mention? It's not like they would ever be honest and tell you they are running low on cash.
I wouldn't mind if their service was value added, billing or accounting or something, but the network could still be used in the event they vanished. If the hardware was open and I could install a Open Source version later, I might have done it.
Maybe Meraki needs to revisit their model and look at it from a customer's viewpoint.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
They sold the first taste of Heroin at less than cost in the hopes of locking people into an ongoing profit stream, and their hopes didn't materialize. That's terrible. Those poor business people.
The hackers did show a lack of savvy. They were trying to help people who have no means to pay, and they put themselves in a position where they were relying on a for-profit corporation to achieve their goals. That's just stupid. Make deals with the devil, end up on fire. They should have known better than to leave themselves vulnerable to external leverage like that.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
IANAL, but it sounds like time for them to find a nice CDN lawyer who would do some pro-bono work to see if they have grounds for legal action. It would seem to me tha a "Tortuous interference" claim might be valid; given the actions appear to interfere with the owners of the hardware's ability to provide services as a result of the update.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Why are they taking a loss? Fon sells a router for $50 and looks like an interesting alternative. They make money selling access to the customer network to non-members.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
How does a EULA apply to hardware? Unless they're leasing the hardware there's no license involved.
I found the contrast between most of Vancouver, which is otherwise one of Canada's most prosperous cities, and the Downtown Eastside so stark as to be completely overwhelming. There was a time when I had been one of the urban unfortunates myself, as I have a mental illness that was at one time quite severe.
I became determined to help those that I could, often buying meals for those who asked me for spare change. But it got to be more than I could bear; the stress of it put me back in the mental hospital - I was brought to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard by an ambulance, where I stayed for three weeks in their Two-South Mental Health ward.
I discuss Vancouver, and many of those who I met there, in my weblog The Vancouver Diaries. That is, the entries before June 30th, 2007, when I moved back to the US. I kept blogging at the site, as I intend to go back someday, but for now I live in Silicon Valley.
I have to say, that the company that remotely installed this firmware, breaking their project, why they have to be worse than The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I don't think I have in my entire life met so many people who are so unfortunate as the residents of the Downtown Eastside. I hope they have a change of heart.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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".
How the hell would they now whether or not the company was taking a loss on each box? Is this something I need to research on everything I buy? You seem to consider this ok? Maybe I should check out the details on my monitor, to make sure that I am not supposed to make up some of the income for the company by visiting certain websites.
If some company screws up and sells my "faulty" goods, then how is this any of my responsibility. And how does this allow them to go in and change the goods they already sold me?
I am having great difficulty understanding your logic on this one.
Is it the hackers fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki is incapable of finding a profit model that suits their needs? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki is retroactively applying their license by updating boxes without notice or consent?
What a company hopes for and the reality of what they get is not my problem or concern. They are from fricking MIT. If they can't do a simple business analysis to come up with a workable pricing and support model, then what the hell are they doing staying in business. This is elementary level thinking, so no, the eggheads from MIT get no sympathy from me.
G
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
Fon is backed by some very big investors, including eBay, Google and two big venture capital companies, so they have money to burn. The FON hype has dried up almost completely since they stopped giving away the routers (necessary action because the free hardware became too popular with the hackers.) It is not apparent whether FON is currently making a profit, what their business plan is and if it can work.
This decline was something people have foreseen for a while. There is a rapidly maturing collection of open source projects to create a real open source Meraki replacement (disclaimer: I am helping develop one of these).
ROBIN is an open source mesh firmware that can run on reflashed Meraki nodes (well, I don't think it's "allowed" by Meraki anymore, since they've changed their license agreement to forbid 3rd party firmware and have made it really difficult to access the bootloader).
Open-Mesh is the dashboard management service that ROBIN nodes are configured to use. The guy who develops this actually started working on this dashboard when Meraki was still Roofnet - compare the Open-Mesh dashboard to the Meraki dashboard, the similarity is obvious. Also, you can buy pre-flashed, fully featured ROBIN nodes from Open-Mesh.com for $50 each, the same price that Meraki sells their crippled "standard version" of their nodes.
OrangeMesh, is an open-source version of the dashboard being developed that will allow you to host your own dashboard server, completely freeing you from reliance on any third party. You can check out it's progress here.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
You're blaming the "hackers" for this? This was a project for a poor community with a limited, fixed budget. The hackers got involved because volunteer efforts were likely the only way this project was going to happen. The only thing that changed was that Meraki switched from one unaffordable model to a different, still-unaffordable one, and in the process alienated a group of hackers with a vested interest in helping them improve their product. Perhaps Meraki should have instead open-sourced their Dashboard code and tried to leverage the efforts of people who are able and willing to help them make it better. And at the same time take a long, hard look at their business model. Because it's threatened by a bunch of hobbyists with some spare time on their hands, they're going to be in real trouble. Rather than trying to extort (too strong a word?) subscription fees for their software, perhaps they would be better served by slightly raising the price on the hardware (which they did) and offering support/services contracts to those customers who can afford them. It's a pretty safe bet that these other customers are going to be evaluating vendors not just on the hardware and software, but also on how open their code is, how robust the user and developer communities are, and whether or not they can count on the vendor (Meraki in this case) to act in their best interests in the future.
A company selling hardware at a loss trying to recover that loss with software sales is their problem. Not mine. Printer manufacturers do that, too, selling their ink printers at a loss to cash in with cartridges. Of course, third party vendors quickly tried to push their own cardridges onto the market, along with refill kits, both of which are being battled fiercly by the vendors of the printers who want to protect their business model. You now have chips in cartridges, protected by law against being duplicated... and so on.
It is a vendor lock in attempt. Try to sell the original part cheaply to win a customer, then milk the customer when he got the item and needs "fuel" to keep it running. Whenever something like this happens, you see a company get all defensive and try their utmost to keep their business model working.
This of course raises the question, why don't they just raise the price to match the cost? You offered that question yourself, why didn't they just raise the price by 70 bucks to make a profit with the original piece of hardware? The answer is simple: There's more money in milking locked in customers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
Who's child is going to do better in school, the one with home internet or the one who had to wait for terminal time at a public site away from home?
Bringing connectivity to an area increases economic activity in that area. By giving people a tool to communicate like internet access, they can start up everything from community-based discussion forums to small businesses online. They will think up uses for the connectivity no one else thought of first.
There is a big and growing Digital Divide in this country coming from unequal access to high speed networking. The price point for high speed is too high for low income people, low income people tend to live in under-serviced areas, and the whole "Screw-you-I-got-mine" attitude should have died with Reagan but it is still with us today like a carcinoma.
I've worked on a neighborhood wireless project to bring low price high speed connectivity to the poor and it is not easy to do. Hardware issues, stability issues, open source wifi drivers suck ass, NDISwrapper with wifi drivers is less stable than mercury fulminate at high heat but with all that, there are dedicated people working to try and improve the lot of others, something your precious Ayn Rand and her uber-klassen seem to blank on. Isn't there a McCain convention for you to be at?
I'll grant you that the goal of the do-gooders was a little ephemeral compared to giving the poor food, but if your goal is sustainable improvement of the lives of the economically downtrodden, you need to do more than simply give them something to eat. Also, it's pretty damn insulting to a poor person to imply that their biggest problem is putting food on the table. Maybe their biggest problem, now that they've solved the food and housing issue, is helping their kids to a better life. You know what might help with that? Access to a computer and the internet at home.
One of the most difficult barriers to entry for folks from low-income backgrounds trying to gain some upward mobility is the lack of access to technological services/devices that those of us raised in a middle-class environment consider basic tools of life. How can you move from slinging burgers or picking strawberries (definitive low class jobs) to secretarial or temp office work (entry level middle class jobs) if you don't have a computer, or access to the internet, or excel, or MS word, etc? These guys were setting out to help bridge the "digital divide" -- explicitly trying to provide access to the online resources the middle and upper classes have to people who don't normally have access to them.
The poor have a variety of needs, don't patronize them by assuming the only need you see is the only need they have.
"Community and city-wide wifi projects everywhere are failing." I'm sorry, but those of us who have succeeded don't like being lumped in with the rest.
summary I have seen on /. to date!"
"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."I guess our beloved Cmd Taco has bever heard of the basic Who, What, Where, When of writing an article.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
You forget that in the free market the customer is at the mercy of the company. The company can do whatever it wants in order to save money; the customer is the enemy and must be prevented from doing the same, lest it lead to the company losing money.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Step 2 is getting people to donate old wireless devices and/or buy eepcs or XOs.
Step 3 is always profit, but this time, it's profit for the folks in the neighborhood.
I understand your confusion since step 2 is often listed as "???"
Did anyone read TFA?
Meraki patched a not-for-profit group's hardware from remote without permission so that it would no longer run the firmware same not-for-profit developed in-house. They did this to hardware that was BSD licensed when purchased. They either employed a backdoor or abused known customer access credentials (likely the former) to do it.
This is probably illegal and certainly wrong.
(TFA doesn't say if a contract was in play between Meraki and the client that would have authorized them to apply the patches, but its clear that the customer had put an end to the agreement so a complaint against Meraki would be legit.)
At the very least, this is a malicious hack against a customer. But I think its more than that.
If the peeps in Vancouver were left to continue their work, they certainly would have had a "competitive" solution which they would likely have offered up online for all to use. This would effectively make them a competitor, and a dangerous one because unhappy Meraki customers would be the most likely to check it out. I would go so far to say that this was a pre-emptive sabotage (with poor Vancouverites in the crossfire).
I have no problem with Meraki adapting their business model to find something that works. But their actions way overstepped the boundaries of the law. They would have been wiser to handle the whole affair in a more benevolent fashion in the first place. They could have, for example, cut a partnership deal with the non-profit to allow them to participate in feature development under NDA and enjoy a subsidized service. Both parties would have come out winners.
Whenever financiers get involved, they always want to lock up the tech because it is the only tangible asset they can claim ownership of. Meanwhile, they miss the essence of business value, which is in the people and the partnerships and the innovation.
I think that the only way community wifi is going to work is if it is community-run, not-for-profit, and vendor independent. There is no question that we will have this soon enough and it will be running on top of WRTs and other similar APs which are abundant and cheap and have loads of after-market conversion options for outdoor use. I'm disappointed to read all these comments bashing the Vancouver hackers, who deserve kudos for their inventiveness, determination, and good will.
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.
Anyone who went to school back 20 years ago would remember that the kids who had a complete home encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, biographies on famous historical people, or had parents who were members of book clubs, found it much easier to write essays or coursework assignments and get good grades than any kid who did not. If you were in luck, you might have a friend or neighbour who had relevant literature. You could try going with an adult to the library (which was probably on the other side of town and only opened late one evening), but you were still taking the chance that someone else had already been there and already taken out the related books. Another chance was a second hand bookstore or the magazine racks of the local shop. Otherwise, you had exhausted all your options. Even the local bookstore would take two weeks to have an order come through.
Even if it weren't a school project or coursework, if you were a kid curious about some piece of technology, you would be lucky if one of the documentary series had an article on that item, or if you found a science magazine in the local shop.
These days, anyone can do a Google search, look for online published research papers, visit online magazine articles, look at online secondhand bookstores or Amazon. All before even having to leave home. That is, if you do have a home computer, internet connection and are familiar with the various applications (desktop, login process, web browser, search engines, touch typing).
That is, if your family can afford a computer and internet access. Many employers complain that their applicants don't have basic computer literacy skills: knowing how connect a system together, keyboard skills, word processing, spreadsheets, E-mail, database packages (Maybe because anyone who does have those skills can find a better job, but it's sad that people don't already have those skills in the first place).
Just by having a computer with internet access is going to allow you to learn many more basic skills in your own time, as well as keep in touch with the rest of the community (forums, job search pages, community college courses).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Don't you mean "In a fascist society like this one"?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The company is taking a loss on each box at $50.
And? Your point?
If they unwisely chose to sell them at a loss - TFB. They have every right to change the terms and price on new units, but IMO they have committed an outright crime (computer trespass, at the very least) by forcing new firmware on already-purchased units.
but these hackers come along and provide the service for free on the same hardware.
Any company that hasn't learned that lesson yet, deserves their fate. If your business model critically depends on something that a third party can provide cheaper (or free), your customers will use the cheaper version.
They showed a clear lack of political savvy
Riiiight - Because we engineers normally have legendary people-skills and political-prowess?
Meraki presented a problem to people who live for solving them. Politics? Gimme a break. If you add non-game rules to the puzzle, someone will find a way to take them out to achieve a better solution.
Potayto, potahto...
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
The article suggests that a Meraki software upgrade has made it impossible to reflash them.
/storage/config.local file with whatever you want; in my case: /storage/config.local"
Actually, you can still easily make them revert to an earlier version which can be reflashed.
As described here:
http://robin.forumup.it/about99-15-robin.html
"you can ssh into the Meraki and create edit the
Code:
echo "firmware.mips.version 6-9163" >
And they'll update themselves to an earlier version.
The founders of Meraki have made huge contributions to open source software and it is good to see that others are taking advantage of their great work and making further improvements.
Look at it this way-say Gateway is losing money competing with Dell.They realize they sold their machines in the past too cheap trying to play Dell's ball game.Nobody would have a problem with them raising the price of new models,or even trying to offer incentives to trade in your old Gateway on a newer more expensive model.But if they pushed out an update that bricked all the old models to where you could only run an ad supported version of Vista Basic on them,yes people would have a shit fit,and rightly so.
In this case it has an extra waft of shit stink because they pushed this as a solution for the poor,whom are typically those who can least afford this kind of asshatery,and then bent them over when the vulture capitalists got involved.So I'm sorry,but this is a big "fu" and I wouldn't trust this company as far as I can throw them.But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Community wireless fails when it is done in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. If a city does it with the intent to blanket the city and pays for it with a trivial amount of tax revenue for the good of the community, it works fine. If a city contracts it out to a company to manage it and pays the company, it works fine. If the city contracts it to a company without paying them and expects the company to cover the costs by selling faster access, it doesn't work at all, however, because 99.999% of people with access to a free network don't care about the speed. If they want fast downloads, they do it from home, work, or the hotel.
Something else that works well is getting a Linux User Group or similar to go to businesses and offer to set up wireless access for them if they will pay for the DSL connection. It's not hard to blanket a city that way for the cost of a few Linksys or Netgear APs. Most people don't care that it isn't a mesh and they can't freely roam....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you're already past the hurdle, why not help the person over?
/.. It's the best, and possibly the only effective, way to increase your vocabulary and improve your spelling. If you are well-read there are many, many other benefits, such as actually knowing what you are talking about. These benefits aren't just good things to have, they are necessary to be an educated person, which most people on places like /. purport to be. Despite the wealth of information around us, I get the impression people, as a whole, are becoming more ignorant, not less, and the spelling skills of the average person seem to show it.
Well, my post is an implicit suggestion to read more, which is the best help there is. The only real way to help your spelling is to read books. I read one or two books a month on a slow month, sometimes a couple a week, including literature, science, math, politics, and plenty of fun stuff too, despite the fact that I spend time at places like
While some people just don't have brains that adapt well to good spelling*, almost everyone will benefit from actually reading well-written material, especially material that was written fifty or more years ago. Language is very precise and if you misuse it, you are prone to being misunderstood. Effective communication requires proper use of the tools, namely language.
* One of the most well-read persons, and possibly the smartest person, I've ever met spells like a remedial fourth-grader, but people like him are uncommon, and he specifically blames his lack of ability to not being taught phonics as a kid.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The economics of the situation are simple: they hired the world's most incompetent ISP, Earthlink, to manage a network. It's like two trains heading towards each other on the same track: you know from the first second that it can't go well, but you just can't look away.... Earthlink can't even manage their own network, based on the hideous connectivity I experienced. I can't imagine how anyone could have expected them to manage community wireless....
Add to that the assumption that Earthlink would have to make money (not just break even---they aren't a nonprofit and their stockholders will keep insisting on making more money) by selling a higher tier service. For that to be viable, you have to A. have some nag screen when you first connect that tells people how to get the higher speed connection, B. have two parallel networks so that the "how to get the higher speed connection" is easy enough for people to remember how, and C. make the public network so unbearably slow that people will want the faster network. You should immediately be able to see the fundamental flaws in such a scheme.
Hiring a company to manage the network can be a good idea, provided that A. the company is competent, B. the company is compensated for the costs of running the network, and C. no policy decisions are made by the company.... If even one of these things is not true, it's going to be a horrible mess.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It is a vendor lock in attempt. Try to sell the original part cheaply to win a customer, then milk the customer when he got the item and needs "fuel" to keep it running.
Except that this isn't what TFA describes. The company sold a product, and then quietly sabotaged their customers' purchased products. This is something very different from trying to "milk" customers for some consumable "fuel". They intentionally damaged the equipment so it couldn't be used in the way it was advertised and the customer was using it.
To use the wornout auto analogy, it's more like your auto dealer sent people around to your house in the middle of the night to sabotage your car, in an attempt to increase your repair bills or persuade you to do a trade-in. Except that in this case, the saboteurs were all too clearly in the pay of the company that sold you the goods.
I do wonder if this is legal in Canada or BC. You'd think that there'd be some laws that would cover such sabotage. With all the laws on the books, was this sort of crime somehow missed?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It's not necessarily stupid; it depends on whether selling the unit at below costs makes it attractive for your customers to do other, more profitable business.
Consider the proverbial "razor/razor blade" business. You sell the razors at a loss, but you make it up by selling your customers a pack of blades every few months for years. Now if those blades, tear bloody furrows in your customers' faces, then having a bad product is what makes your business plan bad, not having a bad strategy.
Nobody in his right mind would buy network equipment where the vendor has demonstrated willingness to push a firmware update without customer permission -- period. Much less if they claim that this allows them to unilaterally change the license and lock the customer out of his own equipment. Granted, in the razor blade model, you have a kind of proprietary feeling about all those razors you lost money in, but you can't go fishing through people's medicine cabinets without people concluding you're dangerously off your rocker.
I can understand how it happens. There are two reasons that businesses fail. They either run out of cash, or somebody with a note or something steps in and pulls the plug (which seldom happens if the cash situation is healthy and on track). I've seen plenty of companies that had a reasonably good product with a plausible strategy, but they just had a fatal cash hiccup; either outgo that was a bit faster than anticipated, or incoming that was a little of schedule.
It's like somebody who ingests poison in a murder mystery; after a while, your recognize that tic as the first of what will eventually become agonizing death throes. The problem with a start up even trying to reposition its products that all their existing customers who bought the old story, and now are unlikely to buy from you ever again. Anybody with any sense knows its easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one, so it probably means one of two things: either they suddenly tripped over a pile of cash that's going to allow them to bootstrap a new business plan, or they've run out of cash to make the old one work. Everybody knows you don't make much money off of early adopters, but you can't use your privileged position with them to mess with their systems, but it doesn't mean you can afford to alienate them unless your original business plan is a total write-off.
Mind you I'm just talking about drastic repositioning of the products that leave customer's future plans messed up. I'm not talking about trying to extort new business out of your customers by exploiting your access to their property. That's either extremely desperate, or extremely, sleazily stupid. I don't know anything about this company, but desperate is much more common than utterly sleazy, although sometimes they go hand in hand.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
This is why I never feel comfortable with 'updates', unless I've vetted them first.
FTA and the linked blog, it appears the firmware update was pushed by the manufacturer, therefore didn't have to happen. I'm not blaming the people affected here as in principle, you may want to receive security updates etc. as a matter of course.
But personally I'm finding more and more that 'updates' often regress the performance of a product due to unnecessary flash new features and political modifications you'd never want or benefit from (such as this).
If the affected users had automatic updates turned off would they be able to legally continue as they were? Would reversing the upgrade somehow implicate them? Is there a legal issue at all?
So yeah, I like to avoid updates whenever I can. That's why I'm still running Win 98 First Edition.
(j/k about Windows 98)
The issue wasn't so much partnering with a for-profit, but not being smart about how they did it.
If you just take a for-profit's product and retool it, then don't be upset if they discontinue the model and leave you stuck - they aren't under any obligation to sell it forever.
On the other hand, writing up a contract between an open-source and for-profit organization where each benefits and has defined responsibilities should be safe. Perhaps the open-source develops the design/code, and the for-profit can make a killing selling it to companies with deep pockets but has to allow cheap/free use for certain purposes. Or you could just develop full blueprints and make them open-source, and pay per unit for actual production.
For-profit companies are often more efficient and can achieve higher economies of scale. On the other hand, they don't share your mission, so you're an idiot if you just lock yourself in without any legal protection.
In this particular case things are a bit more sleezy since the company didn't just stop supplying new equipment, but they went out of their way to break already-sold stuff as well.
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.
This platform is based on el-cheapo 802.11 b/g which is a highly competitive, low margin market.
Basically, all the HW is in the ASICs, and the ASICs and reference SW are not open. In your example, a couple of grad students will do the work of an experienced PCB designer, which in this case will probably be OK since they will just be copying the reference design layout and handing it off to the PCB fab house.
Unfortunately, the only way to get the chips is to deal directly with the manufacturer. If you ever want to get any chips, you will need to convince the chip company that you are worth their bother. They would rather push all their chips to their top 10 customers, which are companies like Cisco, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, etc. At low volume, all you represent is one more company that they have to spend money supporting.
If they decide to deal with you, you will get fed their standard reference drivers. Since this project is something special, you may need register maps, the API to customize the reference drivers, and more support to get up to speed. You are now acting like a key customer instead of yet another OEM slapping some plastic around a reference design.
I think that it would be tough to do a better job making cheap HW than some overseas OEM, and that's not the real problem anyway. The real trick is getting the Chips and SW you will need from the chip manufacturer when you are attempting to take control of things that they prefer to control. Basically, you are at odds with their sales and marketing strategy, and you do not offer large volume.
"Somehow, Spanish has managed to solve the problem."
I claim bullshit on this. That was Juan Ramón Jimenez's dream (1956 literature Nobel Prize), but we are not quite there.
While it's true you know for certain how to pronounce a word as soon as you see it written down, the reverse it's not: you can't always know how to write a word you heared (as it was the point from the previous poster): 'baca' and 'vaca' sound exactly the same as would do 'hueso' and 'ueso' (if the latter existed, which is not). You would write (relevant word remarked) "*tu* madre" but "*tú* eres", again same sound, different graphs.
Even then, there is an exception on the "phonetic rule": letter "x" changed its sound somewhere in between XVI and XVII centuries (I don't know when), so you have some "oldish" proper nouns written down with "x" (like México, Texas or Xavier) that are to be pronounced as "Méjico", "Tejas" or "Javier" instead (well, I don't know but these three exceptions).
"I'd really like to know how that came about."
Not too difficult: Spanish is a latin-based language, and the cute symbols you use to write down ideas are not called "latin alphabet" for nothing.
The phonetic problems come from the fact that there are "too many letters". Letter "b" and "v" became the same sound about the XVII century; letter "h" lost its sound (it's mute) about a century before. There are letters that have different sounds depending on context ("c" on "casa" sounds like "k"ilo, while on "cerilla" it sounds like in "c"entennial). To make things worse, two letters may overlap sounds ("z" always sounds like "c" on "cerilla", while "c" may sound different. Again, "j" has always a hard sound, non-existant in English -more or less like "aghhh" -listen to a mexican saying his country's name; remember that "x" became "j" afterwards), while "g" may sound like previous "j" i.e.: "gemido" or softer like in "guapo", more or less like "gas"). Then you have so-called diacritic rules about accents ('tu' is possesive while "tú" is a pronoun, but they both just sound the same).
And then, some syntactic sugar regarding irregular verbs (while past participle from "comer" -"to eat" is regular and comes as "comido", "poner" -"to put" is irregular and its participle forms as "puesto" instead of "ponido").
Of course every English-spoken people would find verbal forms quite cumbersome (six diferent persons -three singular and three plural, five modes and about four tenses per each mode, with simple and complex ways all of them... oh! and three regular conjugations depending on the verb ending on -ar, -er or -ir, and a plethora of irregular and defective verbs); not as bad as German, but quite there.
Yes, I'm Spanish.