Also I have to add... foreign money is worth a lot in Iceland now, and will for quite a while (decades). It's one of the most serious economic problems facing Iceland, the low value of the currency. It's terrible for the Icelandic population of course, but it means that labour is dirt cheap if you have foreign currency. Odds are you'd get much better bang for the buck.

"Bandwidth is one, another is how much extra does it cost to design a facility to be more resistant to earthquakes as the vulcanization that offers those benefits of abundant geothermal power also means there is seismic instability." While a perfectly legitimate concern, bandwidth is not a problem. Neither is the seismic activity. Any serious seismic activity is well mapped out and building for it hasn't been a problem since we crawled out of the caves (which admittedly was only around 1900). In my opinion, the earthquakes are outright fun, and we know well where the earthquake danger zones are. Start worrying if you hear that they want to build it around Selfoss. ;) I'm born raised in Iceland but currently live in Canada and I've spent a year in Finland, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that the tech guru population per capita in Iceland is drastically higher than in either one of those. Even though the Finns are generally geeks... and I mean that in a good way obviously. Frankly, I think lack of geek skills in Iceland are not a problem for this particular project, and besides, the worst case scenario is that it won't be as monstrously huge as otherwise. Of course I'm biased, I can only promise you that I'd tell you if I thought it were a problem. I suppose the biggest problem would be the controversy over the energy it would require. Even though we are extremely lucky for how cheap electricity is in Iceland, there is also the counter-view that nature is to be preserved and therefore not exploited... even though it's the most nature-friendly way of producing electricity imaginable... okay, let's not get into politics. ;) Honestly, I think that would be the biggest problem. Dealing with the politics.

It seems to be a common misconception that authoritarian, fascist methods to prevent crime don't work. They do. They always worked, they always will. The problem is that it takes away the citizens' privacy as well. If the only argument needed for increased surveillance is to deter crime, then we've essentially doomed ourselves into a society of surveillance, because it always works. Lack of privacy, even in public houses, needs to be seen as problem, not as something that can endlessly be given up in the name of security. Freedom and democracy always were and always will be unpredictable, that's what's so cool about them. To hell with the CCTV cameras. Of course they work to deter crime, the problem is that they also work to control the population, and that's a real problem that needs to be considered as well, not simply ignored.

You might be able to convince them that it's actually in their own interest that you contribute code back to the project, as it's still BSD and they can still use it. In other words, it seems like they don't want anyone to have the improvements that you would otherwise make, even if they don't want to pay for it. A lot of companies have such clauses simply because they don't bother to think about it, and they're compelled to be as mean as possible, since that's somehow supposed to be more grownup behavior. Usually though, those with the most cynical view of open-source software development as competition, even when it suits themselves, tend to know absolutely nothing about it. Use that.