I am from India. Bandwidth is costly here. Internet enabled devices have surprisingly have become cheaper. Making some access 'Free' could change the world of many people.
I agree where there is food and shelter in short, giving Internet free may not help to fight these. But it will help to fight corruption and bureaucracy. Many important government services are online nowadays. In West-Bengal, government stopped online college admission just to keep bureaucratic system going. They fear free Internet, it is a killer for corruption here.
This is a difficult choice. On one hand I believe that Wikipedia should be FREE in all senses of the word. On the other hand making one exception will create more exceptions. Why not make facebook and Gmail free to access so that people can communicate? I want this exception for Wikipedia. But I am worried.
Cant agree to the points. It all depends on use case. In some cases it is even beneficial to remove the OS itself. I am not talking about high lveel OS like Linux, QNX or VXWorks, even MicroC OS II is a big overhead for some systems.
Consider how your car decides to deploy the airbags. Do you want a message queue? No, as soon as hardware inputs meets the condition the airbags needs to be deployed. On the other hand on the same car will have a infotainment system that has VxWorks/QNX/WinCE with multi process architecture. Most of them even have separate processor to interface vehicle CAN bus and power management. Inside the application processor, graphics and HIM will be distributed in some processes. The low level drivers codecs in another set of processes. The whole thing will just give the user a mediaplayer, a map and a phone interface.
Some OEMs (e.g. Daimler, Ford) even distribute this whole functionality across different H/W modules.
Dividing gives you maintainability, re-usability, drop-in replacement alternatives. Most of the cases it shortens the engineering time, improves quality and reduces product recall.
The above automotive embedded example is just one use case. There are many areas where you want to distribute your application in many ways.
Finally, I want to ask one small question, when you turn off the reading light in a passenger aircraft, how many processes do you want it (Switch OFF signal) to go through before the light turns off? and why so?
I agree where there is food and shelter in short, giving Internet free may not help to fight these. But it will help to fight corruption and bureaucracy. Many important government services are online nowadays. In West-Bengal, government stopped online college admission just to keep bureaucratic system going. They fear free Internet, it is a killer for corruption here.