For the past three-odd years, WAN/LAN consultant Richard Couture has
operated the CoffeeNet, a 100% Linux-based Internet cafe, at 744
Harrison near Third Street, San Francisco. Today is its last day of
operation at the current location. (If you want to visit, do so before
today's 2 PM closing time.)
In 1996, when Richard decided to build The CoffeeNet, he made a number
of
choices that seemed bold by prevailing standards: It was based on
a custom
Linux distribution developed by Richard and his friend Michael
Nelson,
coordinated via NFS and NIS+, running on commodity Pentium X
workstations. The
business was entirely self-funded with no outside
capital.
Unlike several
would-be competitors -- some venture-capital funded, such
as the now-bankrupt
Cyberworld cafe -- Richard's operation has not
attempted to sell Internet
access: The business model has been to offer
a pleasant restaurant experience,
where Internet access is an amenity,
rather than the core of the business.
Basing that amenity on Richard
and Michael's rock-solid but
average-user-friendly Linux distribution
has meant no need for technical staff
and no machine downtime: The
systems run themselves.
Cyberworld's owners, when
Richard paid them a courtesy call in 1998,
clearly felt that Richard was an
amateur whom they were going to bury,
receiving him with barely-concealed
contempt: After all, they felt,
he wasn't smart enough to base his operation
around MS Windows NT,
to charge an hourly rate, or keep staff on-hand to rebuild
and debug
software.
Within a year, Cyberworld lost several million dollars and
went out
of business. One of their last acts was to ask if Richard could
accomodate some of their customers who had rented Cyberworld for
parties.
Richard, always gracious, said "Of course."
Over the last five years at 744
Harrison, Richard's building has been
an incubator and home for a significant
portion of the Bay Area's Linux
and free-software community. Windows Refund Day
and the Silicon Valley
Tea Party were planned there. CABAL, Bay Area Debian,
BayLinuxChix, the
Python group BayPIGgies, SFpcUG Linux SIG, and City College of
San
Francisco LUG have met there. The open-source publicity firm Electric
Lichen, LLC (now part of VA Linux Systems) was based there. The
Internet
hosting operation LinuxCabal is there. And Linux community
activist and
one-time WAN/LAN consultant Rick Moen lives there (as does
Richard, himself).
Richard Stallman has spoken there. Dale Sheetz and Joey Hess of the
Debian
project, Python author Guido van Rossum, and Marc Ewing of Red
Hat Software,
Inc., ditto. Two local ISPs and a number of other local
businesses hold regular
meetings and events, there.
And, throughout all of those events, members of the
general public
find to their surprise that they're using Linux, and liking it.
The
CoffeeNet has always been Exhibit A used to refute FUD assertions that
Linux
is too difficult for "average users": Hundreds of regular people
off the street
come in every day, and use the public machines with no
problems and no training
whatsoever.
The CoffeeNet is closing today because Richard is preparing to find
and
move to a new building, elsewhere in San Francisco. It's very likely
that
he will reopen The CoffeeNet in some form at the new location,
because he enjoys
giving Internet access to the public, and support to
the free-software
community.
Ordinarily, you could check out The CoffeeNet's on-line presence at
http://www.coffeenet.net/. Since
Thursday at 6 PM, however, one of the
two sDSL lines serving 744 Harrison has
been cut (thank you, PacBell!),
cutting off numerous Internet hosts, including
Richard's, The
CoffeeNet's, and mine. Some hosts on
the other sDSL line are
also difficult to reach, because of
dependencies on the unreachable hosts' DNS.
There is not yet an
estimated time for restored service, as the breakage hasn't
yet been
found.
