Who’s behind Fon?
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Of course, Fon wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t Martin Varsavsky to seduce venture investors and promote the idea. But Fon wouldn’t be possible if there was not Sebastian Gottschall, the man who built the Fon’s firmware and who became the cornerstone of the company.
Sebastian Gottschall lives in East Germany and probably he’s the kind of guy people automatically describe as “Wow, that’s a hacker”. Dyed hair, heavy metal hair-cut, a shy and kind smile bundling a deep eye glare, more often called by its nickname, Brainslayer, that his real name. He works as a developer on day time and on his night time, volunteers to blanket a free WiFi network in Dresden, Germany.
He’s quite an expert of firmwares, aka router softwares. First when he was setting the Dresden community wireless network ― his code has been so far downloaded by 300,000 people ―, then when he was working for Sveasoft, a maker of router firmware. In fact, he cracked the code and released an open source version entitled Dd-Wrt. Check here the Google Maps of Dd-Wrt users, there’s quite a bunch.
His popularity on the network made him met Fon’s founder, Martin Varsavsky. And what happened when a brainslayer guy met a seeker ofdisruptive business? A ” dream comes true“. Dd-Wrt is now the Fon official firmware, which funds its future development. Check the story, well written by Red Herring.
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Mar 17, 2006 | By Nuno
3 comments
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To be precise, fon provides two different firmwares. One, as stated, is based on DD-WRT with the aid of Brainslayer.
The other one is based on OpenWRT, and in fact, it was the first one released by fon. It’s a much more basic firmware in terms of customizability, though.
Brainslayer was fire like bill liao, euduardo arcos (alt1040), diego cabezudo, etc.
Antonio, some late April’s fools?