[freehaven-dev] Re: Business possibilities for Free Haven

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 06:16:16PM -0500, owner-freehaven-dev@seul.org wrote:
> From: "Thomas Curran" <tcurran@csi.com>
> To: <freehaven-dev@freehaven.net>
> Subject: RE: [freehaven-dev] We're going to start using this list again
> Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 00:14:23 +0100
> 
> Roger, great idea (to use the list). I'd like to exchange some ideas about
> how Freehaven can be used by people in business someday.
> Any thoughts?
> Thomas
 
I'm afraid your mail was bounced by majordomo because you included a
>100K pdf attachment. In the future, it's generally better practice to
put papers like that up on a webpage somewhere and simply send a url.

As for using Free Haven in business...I have a couple of answers.

The first answer is "sure, go for it, it's free." 

My second answer is what do you mean "in business"? As in, people trying
to get their work done in some intranet environment, and having this make
them more efficient or more useful or something? I find that tough to
imagine.  As in, people using the Free Haven notions to make money? Well,
there are a number of cypherpunk people who've always imagined that
providing reliable service in a network like this is worth value, and
people will pay for reliability. But that's still a ways away...

In the Berkeley conference in July (before most of this p2p craze
started), some people from Daiwoo tried to invest in (or just outright
buy) Free Haven. It was very difficult to communicate that our goal was
to make all of the software absolutely free (in a 'liber' sense), and
to enable everybody else to make all information everywhere free.  This
includes making transactions untraceable, and perhaps even unprovable.

The Free Haven goals seem counter to most business approaches these days,
which are 'create value and then trade it to certain people for money'.

Can you specify more clearly what you mean by "in business", in a context
where you think Free Haven might actually be beneficial?

--Roger