[p2p-research] What should a Community do with Profit? (was: personal server technology)

[M. Fioretti]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 12:37:33 PM -0700, Patrick Anderson (agnucius at gmail.com) wrote:
> M. Fioretti wrote:
> > community owned ISP, that is somebody you can control a bit
> 
> Could you tell me more about how and by who these are owned?

Unfortunately, I have no *direct* experience of any such ISP, so I
can't help you when it comes to price/cost details, but they do exist.
Two I have met online are Ninux, see http://stop.zona-m.net/node/47,
and the Catalonia WCN linked from that article. More exactly, Ninux is
still in the amateur/hacking phase, but WCN is already a reality, so
you should contact them directly to see *if* and how they fit with
your definition of community owned, and how their costs work.

> > The only problem today is that most VPS offers are sized for big
> > websites, not for this kind of needs.
> 
> Could these be community owned?

Maybe I must introduce a bit of terminology here, in order to
answer. A professional, reliable datacenter is a big, big room with
state of the art air conditioning, redundant power supply and internet
backbone connections, fire alarm... and 24/7 onsite professionals to
keep it running, replace faulty hw components asap etc... Inside those
big rooms there are tenths or hundreds of racks, each carrying tenths
of special computers. "special" means "made with higher quality parts,
and shaped to be packed as densely as possible".

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtual computer, that is a purely
software environment remotely accessible, which "looks" and works like
a normal computer. Companies set up a datacenter as above, then
partition each of the physical microprocessors in those special
computers to work as N different, totally independent VPSs and then
"rent" each of them to a different customer. The customer can run
inside the VPS any software he or she wants, including web servers,
email servers, whatever.

A VPS can certainly be "community owned", and so can a datacenter. The
problem today is that there is little or no demand for "community
owned" datacenters aimed just to provide VPSs for "personal server"
usage, at least not enough to make them economically affordable.

I am not sure if I answered your question, but I hope what I wrote
will be helpful to ask more specific answers :-)

> Could a Cloud be Community Owned?

Yes, I think, but the real question is "why"? First you should define
exactly what you mean by "cloud", next which communities really need a
"cloud" and why, why is a "cloud" better than a "not-cloud"
solution...

> What should a Community do with Profit?

this is a general question, which has nothing to do with clouds and
which I'm not qualified to answer, I think. I suggest that you simply
ignore it in the context of this thread. The point here is *if* you
need a cloud in the first place, then *if* you really need it *if* you can build or buy
your very own one.

     Marco
-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84