griffey

Problem is that the current administration is ALSO going after 501c3s. They just changed the rules for reporting via 990 tax forms (that non-profits in the US use to report their activities) to make them far more detailed and require more details about where and how money is being spent. On the surface, most people read that and think "good, more information is better" but what ends up happening is that foundations and other large donors may shift the way they give due to the new ruling, which will leave huge swaths of non-profits without funding.

That's great news. I will keep an eye out and would happily throw a few bucks your way for a 16 pro max version.

I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.

I haven't done so yet, but I'll throw a link to ButterBox up on the LibraryBox site and suggest people take a look.

waves at n8fr8too...

Thanks for situating this in history! It's easy for people to look at the project and be like "why no RPi?" without understanding that when LibraryBox started, Raspberry Pi's didn't have onboard wifi, and the travel routers we chose to support were SIGNIFICANTLY less expensive as well. We're in a very different hardware world now.

FWIW: one of the other main issues with the project as it neared its end was the move to mandatory SSL connections. By its nature, LibraryBox has to be able to work entirely offline, and trying to sort out how to manage SSL connections in that situation without also causing potential security issues in sensitive use situations...well, we tried and couldn't come up with a reasonable, usable solution to those overlapping issues.

At one point there was a sort of "starter" content set that was made up of CC or public domain works that was distributed by the community as a torrent. But the project itself was always about the hardware/infrastructure aspect, not the content itself.

Hello all! I'm the creator and director of the LibraryBox project. Sadly, the project is mostly ceased for a handful of reasons. As noted here, Matthias stopped production of Piratebox code, which was the underlying basis for LibraryBox.

When the FCC passed the rule a few years back that 5Ghz chipsets had to be firmware locked, the hardware that we mostly relied on dried up. Rather than producing 2.4-only devices or leaving the 2.4 unlocked, manufacturers like TP-Link just firmware locked everything. This killed the MR3040 and MR3020, and without those as primary hardware targets, development stalled.

LibraryBox never pivoted to the RPi, for a few reasons...the biggest being that for most of our development, the RPi didn't have onboard wifi, and driver support for USB wifi dongles was a horrorshow. The other big driver was that LibraryBox always focused on the lowest possible price point devices, and the RPi was never the cheapest, so it was never our focus.

The project is "dead", in that there's no ongoing development (unless someone out there wants to jump into the GitHub). But I'm keeping it up because there are still pockets of the hardware out there in the world that people might want to convert.