<nettime> The end of "Digital Island"?

[Czako Krisztian <slapic@fido.hu>]

As you may know, in the last 3 years, at the "Student Island" (now called
Papsi Island) in Hungary some volunteers made a Digital Island.
I work on it for two years know. First time it was a BBS, mainly created
by cybernauts from the Netherlands.
Last year we had 10 PCs with Linux and 10 dial-up lines to the internet,
and as almost everithing at the "Pepsi Island", it was free.

After our (and your) 2/3 years work, MATAV, the Hungarian PTT got known
that it is a big business for them. So now they do the whole thing, and
made impossible to us to work on it with or without them. They told me,
that it's a really good idea, but know thay are who do this, and not us.
(After they were asked by the director of "Pepsi Island", they hadn't
changed this.)
So we did something for the people for free, and know MATAV do it for
money. (I mean, as the've promised, it will be free for the people, but
they use it for advertise themselves and to sell accounts, but there
won't be any user help there...)
You can see their WWW homepage at http://www.matav.hu/ and/or
http://www.matav.hu/sziget/
They said this is the best man can made...

We couldn't do anything againts them, because:
- "Pepsi Island" needs telephone lines, and MATAV has a monopolium here on
this (so they had to agree with them!)
- We were just people, not a coorporation.

So now we've decided to continoue our work as a foundation, so maybe we
could be successfull in the future.
We'll found "Digitalis Sziget Alapitvany" (Digital Island Foundation) in
Hungary to make meeting, cultural and surfing place for the Cybernautes,
places to put their homepage on.
We need everybody's help, because we hasn't got any choice when we want to
connect to the internet: the leased lines and almost all of the Hungarian
internet lines is owned by MATAV.
The internet and phone rates are really high in Hungary too :(
(It's 5x more the price of a leased line then 2 years ago!!!)

Now we'll try to get a place for our www server, try to register our name
in Hungary (under .hu) and we'll make a homepage.
Aftre this we'll try to get money to reach our goal. 

I hope next year we'll be able to do something for the people and not for
money.

Best regards,
				Slapic

ps: Since we've started to work on it, everybody did it for free.
Everything we'v got are tickets to "Pepsi Island".

ps2: sorry for my poor English :(

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