[arin-ppml] Demand for community networking

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net 
> [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Chris Boyd
> Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 2:44 PM
> To: ppml at arin.net
> Subject: [arin-ppml] Demand for community networking
> 
> Since some people expressed concern for contact maintenace, 
> address tracking etc.
> 
> There's clearly a demand for such services, as witnessed by 
> http://www.wiana.org/ 

I disagee that there is demand.  wiana is free and their software is
free and basically everything about them - except the hardware
that locusworld loads with their software - is free.

The second they start charging real money that will be the end of it.

It's not -real- demand.

Wiana is like the people who are out there claiming that since Linux has 2
million
installs and that Windows has 10 million installs, that Linux is 20%
of the operating system market, so dammit, why isn't Nvidia releasing
graphics drivers for Linux?

Well the answer is that Nvidia didn't start doing this until RedHat
got significant share in the Linux market - because RedHat costs money.
The ironic thing, though, is that RedHat is almost a swear word in the
Linux community and many that are forced to run commercial Linux software
will go out of their way to run it on CentOS.

Wiana fills a need for the enthusiast, that's why it exists.  But, what
they are doing doesn't map to the public Internet in any way and it
is misleading to draw parallels here.  The activists and enthusiasts
that are using it WON'T come into the ARIN fold - any more than I would
ever pay money for a Windows OS to run on a server - and I've been
running FreeBSD servers in commercial settings for the last 15 years.
They don't want to pay money to ARIN and won't do it, no matter what
we try.

When the day comes that IPv4 is dead, the wiana people will likely be
among the first to invent address translation for IPv6.

Ted