For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.

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It faces daunting challenges from China Inc. and the free software movement, and its high-margin boxes may yet fall under the same relentless cost pressure that has long strained most hardware businesses.

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With the same fervor that rallied the open-source free software movement, members of such groups as Seattle Wireless, in Seattle, Washington, SFLan in San Francisco and Consume.net in London are bolting radio antennas to their roofs and broadcasting a shared invisible connection to their friends down the block.

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This is the movement for free software, whose code can be downloaded by anybody and is written and refined by a community of hobbyists.

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SFLan and similar efforts such as Consume.net (in London), Guerrilla.net (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), and Seattle Wireless are reminiscent of the open-source movement, whose members contribute to free software such as the operating system Linux.

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According to Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, as the open-source movement grows, it will get better at producing free clones of commercial software.

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