[Fsf-friends] Distributing mirrored data on CD to low bandwidth people.

[Imran William Smith]

We are in the process of creating a mirror of some
open source / free software in Malaysia, since the
local mirror situation is not good.  What is the mirror
situation like in India / South Asia?

My main question:

Broadband rollout is currently low in Malaysia.  We
could help open source here by sending out CDs of the
key open source apps / distros / packages.  They'd
probably be sent free since we have some funds for Malaysian
open source development.  But we don't want to be taken
advantage of.  Also, we'd like to encourage the software
to spread further than just the people we send to.

Can anybody see some way of turning this into a pyramid?
I am thinking, maybe we could send 1 or 4 copies. If 4
copies, your name gets added to a database on the web,
and others near you can come and get the other 3 copies.
Something like that.

It could be heavily engineered (credits for helping out
on a web site, credits for sending copies to extra people,
debits when we send people CDs) or all based on trust.
Trust is probably better.  But we want to make sure that
the people who benefit are those who really don't have
the bandwidth, rather than somebody who has access to
the data in other channels but prefers us to send to them.
We also have to make totally sure that we are distributing
legally (for GPL, would we have to bundle source with
binary, or just make the URL for the source very clear
on the CD with the binary?)

Thanks for your thoughts....


Imran



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