NSF support for open source networking

I was interviewed by Katie over at GigaOM yesterday about the new NSF funding for an open source wireless mesh project. Pretty cool stuff and continues the trend of more funding for open source in the networking market. More funding for open source networking projects should continue and we're excited to help folks take those projects and turn them into viable products.

If open source wireless mesh takes off, it could make life interesting for the vendors feeding the Muni WiFi deployments, like Google's in Mountain View, CA. Personally, wireless access in public places is very convenient and if I ever in an airport for more than an hour I always by the service to download email and write blog posts.

If I can blog over a wireless mesh built on open source software that leads to a commodity hardware device running our open source router/firewall, all the better! That day is not too far off from what I can tell :)