Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> At NYC salaries? In a greenfield scenario, I could easily spend $900,000 a year in just payroll and benefits

I kind of don't understand what you're getting at here. They're a nonprofit. The majority of their work is coming from volunteers. They aren't paying New York salaries.

This is like going to Linus and saying "You can't possibly expect Linux to be sustainable - do you have any idea how much money Microsoft pays its developers?"

Nonprofit/open models aren't less work than commercial ventures; the difference is that people and companies donate their time/money because they want the project to succeed. If they end up with a competitive enough product, then businesses will start sponsoring more development, because it'll be a cheap alternative to dealing with Comcast.

At that point, large businesses operating in the city will pay/sponsor New York salaries to maintain the parts of the project they find useful. Exactly like every other Open Source or community run project on the planet.

I have plenty of doubts about volunteer mesh networks, but I'm not so skeptical to say they literally can't work. I think you're looking at one particular model of the market and assuming that anything deviating from that model is broken, rather than just targeting different segments or trying a different strategy or even just accomplishing different goals.

> The majority of their work is coming from volunteers.

> the difference is that people and companies donate their time/money because they want the project to succeed.

And that volunteering time and energy are probably valuable then, especially if they can do the work of a real ISP.

I think one real question to ask though is what is actually more efficient—donating volunteer time and energy to a nonprofit, or donating money and having that nonprofit hire professionals instead?

GP doesn't sound like he is saying a volunteer mesh network literally cannot work, just pointing out that a network is inherently expensive to run, whether it is 'fully accounted for' on a payroll, or merely hidden in the cost of 'free' volunteering effort. It's an open question of whether asking for people's time or their money is better in the long run. Capitalism tends to suppose the latter.

> I think one real question to ask though is what is actually more efficient—donating volunteer time and energy to a nonprofit, or donating money and having that nonprofit hire professionals instead?

That's a good question. Judging from software development (which may or may not map perfectly to hardware infrastructure) both seem to work pretty well. Depending on who you ask you'll get different answers about whether closed (purely paid) or open (either volunteer or mixed) is "winning".

But certainly they seem to both work, on the whole. Neither strategy is so radically inefficient that it's safe to dismiss a company that relies on one over the other.

The incumbents are really good at suppressing competition.

One response/workaround: Guerrilla networking.

Why, in part? Because there's nothing much to target, financially. In some ways, legally. Instead, the incumbents have to elicit suppression through regulators and law enforcement, if they can.

Google has deep pockets. But it could spend years trying to get access to poles. Incumbents don't just pay to oppose; they pay to slow things down as much as possible. Good luck deploying, when you have to wait 6 months for a court case, that's then going to get appealed.

Stay under the radar. That's a whole different approach.

And communities are getting desperate enough to try anything that might actually work.

While I cheer them on, I simultaneously hope the press coverage doesn't bring the corporate mercenaries down on their heads.

Reminds me of the Corey Doctorow/Charles Stross short story Unwirer: https://craphound.com/unwirer/

FTE can work a few extra hours a week at a non profit more easily than they can make more money at their job and donate that. They may also enjoy their time and learn valuable skills which make the time vs money argument misleading, because for most tech workers they are very different pools.

Volunteers donate their time because they enjoy it. We have so many volunteers it is hard to keep track of them all. Obviously it is more efficient to use volunteers if there are enough. We are considering using contractors for some huge projects we are planning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com