The wilder shores of the internet are awash with bizarre stories but the one I'm about to relate just has to be one of the most extraordinary things I have ever heard in relation to FOSS. You will have heard about SOPA and the reaction against it in the open source community including petitions, boycotts of GoDaddy etc. Look, that's small potatoes. What these guys are plannng is out of this world. Literally. Read on.
Every hacker, geek and commentator has their own solution to circumvent internet censorship but some people's reaction has been ballistic. In the actual sense of the word. A bunch of open source enthusiasts, hackers and amateur scientists at the Hackerspace Global Grid project have decided that the only way to escape internet censorship is to, well, reach escape velocity and launch communication satellites into orbit. Ambitious is not the word. Better still, the software and the hardware will be free and open. To track and support satellites there will be a distributed network of ground tracking stations using FOSS.
At least that's what's being said. The HHG project is much more coy about this and say that at this stage they are concentrating on core infrastructure. Yet, Nick Farr, one of the people involve in the project has said, "The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let's take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities".
There are massive technical and legal issues here but you can't fault these guys for thinking big. Petitions and boycotts be damned. Hit the launch button.