I was in the city primarily to attend the first European Open Source Convention (OSCON), a €1,000-a-head, three-day event organised by O'Reilly Media. It took place at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, one of the finest hotels in the city. "When royalty come to Amsterdam," I was told, "they stay at the Kras."

The Grand Hotel had a suitably Grand Ballroom, where the keynote speeches started each day at a bracing 8.45. However, the presenters had to battle against more than audience fatigue to get their message across. O'Reilly had rolled out a conference-wide, fast and free wireless network which allowed attendees to surf the net any time they wished. It's not as if the organisers had any choice. I suspect a significant proportion of the attendees would have put robust WiFi access higher than running water on their list of conference must-haves.

Of course, €1,000 is a lot of money. In reaction to that, and to the invitation-only nature of another O'Reilly event called Foo Camp, the open source community has started a series of grassroot get-togethers under the Bar Camp banner ("bar" follows "foo" in the canonical list of words hackers use when they need a temporary identifier for something).

Bar Camp Amsterdam was held the day after OSCON at the offices of Mediamatic, a new media arts collective, in a soon-to-be-demolished tower block on the Amsterdam waterfront. This and other satellite events kept a hardcore of free software people in the city for the entire week.

But by Saturday morning the luxury of WiFi was just a memory, and several of our group were going cold turkey. So, after a café lunch (which cost slightly less than one-third of the price of breakfast at the Kras), we set off on a 45-minute trek across Amsterdam. "How far will geeks go for bandwidth?" mused one of my companions.

Our destination was ASCII, the Amsterdam Centre for Subversive Information Interchange, a "techo-squat" which has had several premises over the past six years but is currently based in the middle of a row of shops in an ethnically-diverse area of east Amsterdam. Importantly for our purposes, it is at the heart of an effort to roll out free community wireless internet access across the city.

In the front window (re-glazed and specially reinforced by the new occupants after an ex-tenant threw a bicycle through it) there were four recycled computers running Linux and Firefox, offering free internet access to anyone who walked in.

We pushed open the door and moved past the computers towards the back of the shop. The shaven-headed youth behind the counter regarded our group of pasty-faced middle-class geeks with a look of indifference.

"Yes?"

"Er, hi. We heard about you guys from Mediamatic, and so we thought we'd come over and, er, check it out."

"Ah." He seemed entirely unimpressed.

"We're all free software people."

He raised an eyebrow. "Really? What free software?"

"I work on Firefox, and these guys are Drupal."

He broke into a smile. "OK, cool. Welcome to ASCII."

We sat down on a surprisingly smart sofa, underneath a stencilled black-on-yellow banner proclaiming "Free WiFi! Your keyboard is your weapon!", and started to hack on our various projects, enjoying that particular sort of geek fellowship which comes from concentrating very hard on your computer in the presence of other people.

I asked the admin, does someone live here all the time? "Oh, no."

But can't they take the place back if there's no-one in? "Yeah, well technically we should have someone here all the time but in practice we don't."

And you aren't concerned about the owner? "We don't expect him to come round any time soon."

So you don't live here, then. "Of course not."

His attitude seemed to say that no one could be expected to live in such a place. "No," he continued, "I live in another squat around the corner."

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