maximilln's Journal: A business model

Inevitably someone else will be able to take advantage and make this idea work profitably, but I'm still going to write it down because it's a good idea. Ideally I'd be the one to implement it (because I'd like to become financially self-sufficient) but I just don't have the startup capital for it.

We need open source ISPs. I'm not specifically talking about the hardware and software used by the ISP. It would be nice to have all the hardware and software open sourced to avoid hypocrisy but that's really irrelevant.

We need ISPs that rely on open source users as their customer base.

Current ISPs support Windows users. That means that they have a high overhead devoted to security, support, fighting viruses, fighting drone boxes, fighting spam, and compiling the proprietary privacy violating lists that they sell to any marketer that comes calling at their door. That means that we, the open source users who maintain our own systems, suffer two offenses.

First: the cost of our service is escalated to cover the loss on the Windows users. This is a system that (hopefully) more people will come to understand. Any time a business loses money (for example, supporting clueless computer users) the profit margin is buffered by passing the cost onto another segment of the client base (the competent computer users). Distributed over the entire customer base this may not add up to much per user but it means a whole schload of cash to the business.

Second: Our open source dollars, as a collective open source user base, gets funneled into funding closed source systems. This is the real offense. Per user we may be paying only $2-$3 more per month but, as a collective of 100 million open source users, that's $200-$300 million per month that we put into funding the proprietary software/security paranoia industry. I'm not talking about the gaming industry. They need to be proprietary to make money. I'm talking about things like trusted computing, and BIOS monitoring, and Windows tech support. We, the open source community, lose our hard-earned money to all of that. Our open source dollars help fund the band-aids that combat zombie Windows drone boxes sitting on cable modems all over the world. Wouldn't it be better if we could spend that $200-$300 million per month funding open source awareness and better security at the OS level rather than the ISP level?

We need an ISP that relies on an open source client base and the clients need to be dedicated. For only $2-$3 less per month they'll get less customer support from the ISP but they'll also be consolidating their financial contribution AWAY from the Microsoft/TCPA/Palladium style movements. Users of open source OSs are much more likely to zero and reinstall their systems at the first sign of suspicious syslogs or odd system behavior. Windows users will happily use a zombied box for years until the system flat out refuses to boot.

An open source ISP would benefit the network as a whole because it would host fewer zombie/rooted boxes for shorter periods of time. Without the open source dollars the Windows ISPs wouldn't be able to financially afford dealing with an incompetent and unattentive user base. They simply wouldn't have our money to leech from.