John, Craig,
how do you explain the services of file hosting? By those services millions of persons free-load pictures, videos, text, GBs of data, etc.. I think that what I asked is quite similar, that is the use of a piece of remote hardware where to have free software installed. The difference in my opinion is in the fact that I implicitly asked also for the use of a free operating system, but not in the hardware or in its maintenance.
On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 3:56 AM, John R Pierce
<pierce@hogranch.com> wrote:
On 08/06/11 4:40 PM, David Johnston wrote:
The bottom line is I would not expect to find any individual or company willing or able to offer such a service, to the general public, for free. And it is a service you are requesting as opposed to a product like PostgreSQL. A product is more likely to be improved by the people using it compared to a service, and those improvements are likely to make it back into the original.
indeed, especially a service like hosting that has significant ongoing hard costs involved... a colocated server requires power, air conditioning, network traffic and transit fees, management, physical security, and the cost of the hardware itself, which has typically a 3-5 year lifespan (in 3 years, newer hardware can do so much more work its often not cost effective to keep the old hardware online).
On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 4:25 AM, Craig Ringer
<ringerc@ringerc.id.au> wrote:
On 7/08/2011 1:08 AM, Scott Ribe wrote:
After open source for the software, we will wait for open resource for the hardware (this is just a first example http://www.arduino.cc/, even if of different nature).
While the plans may be free, the actual hardware sure as hell won't be.
Arduino is not so much a "will" as an "is". It's in wide-spread use and has even been adopted for the base of the new Android peripheral development system - the Android Open Accessory Development Kit.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/usb/adk.html
I struggle to see any connection between Arduino and PostgreSQL, though. They're very different kinds of free/open source, as software "is" its specification and can be distributed at no cost, but you can't just download a hardware device and use it.
--
Craig Ringer
