[Commotion-discuss] Internet.org

[Ben West]

Private industry collusion towards self-serving goals is pretty common
place for the Internet these days.  (Boy, don't I sound jaded.)

The partners thus far disclosed: Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia,
Opera, and Qualcomm, are all content providers or device manufacturers, no
carriers.  This looks similar to the dichotomy observed here in the US in
the "Net Neutrality" debate, where you see traditional phone/cable carriers
like Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast spar with content providers or
device manufacturers like Google and Microsoft.

So, yes indeed, a possible outcome from this partnership could be an
ultra-low-cost Android tablet with heavily optimized versions of Chrome OS
/ Opera / Facebook Home, bundled with very cheap 4G/LTE service, and
finally polished off with a generous helping of spyware.  No doubt such a
device could become the introduction to the Internet for a billion people,
but I can't help but be wary about how mediated that Internet access would
be.

Also, nothing about the partnership suggests any willingness to seriously
engage any Open Source technology, in particular the conspicuous lack of
Canonical's Ubuntu Edge or a successor to the OLPC.

Most unsettling is Qualcomm's participation, since they own all Atheros IP
now.  Almost all of Commotion's success in mesh wifi (and likewise for
OpenWRT / Funkfeuer / Ninux) derives from the existence of the Open Source
ath9k driver.  Has anyone perhaps seen a roadmap PDF from Qualcomm /
Atheros indicating the intended successor to the ath9k chipset?

That is, these guys are getting pretty old:
http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Atheros

I'm curious about Open Source driver prospects for these devices:
http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Qualcomm_Atheros



On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 4:47 PM, <
Commotion-discuss.NeoPhyte_Rep at ordinaryamerican.net> wrote:

> Technology leaders launch partnership to make internet access available to
> all
> Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm, Samsung to be
> founding partners
>
>
> https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/851575_492821944140017_1070145609_n.pdf
>
> Is this good, bad, or indifferent?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commotion-discuss mailing list
> Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-discuss
>
>


-- 
Ben West
http://gowasabi.net
ben at gowasabi.net
314-246-9434
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