Please Anthony, stop being a troll. You are being completely ignorant and rude. On 20/05/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: -- Robert[hl] [[User:Lcarsdata]] http://roberthl.wikitest.co.uk/

Thirded, but I think it is quite obvious from my responses to Anthony that I think he is a troll. Cbrown1023 -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Alison Wheeler Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 9:03 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in business development On Sun, May 20, 2007 13:26, Robert Leverington wrote: Seconded. Leasing equipment is what you do when you need the option to be able to cancel it should trading conditions turn against you and you no longer need the equipment (which is not the case with WMF - we *know* that our usage will continue to increase not decrease) -or- you want to be able to mark down the lease / interest payments against your tax liability, again which does not apply to WMF. As Robert got to saying first, please be constructive and don't troll. Alison Wheeler _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On 5/20/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: There are situations where leasing is a clear net win. One of them is an organization with no capital of note, but a steady income (or donations) stream over time - you can get many more servers earlier by leasing than you could by paying as you go, though the cost per server over a long time period is higher. Assuming that the organization is a growing going concern, then the servers/time curve can be plotted versus fraction of the organization's total budget going in to those servers, for periods of order of the lease lifetime, and see what the overall impact is. On a tangental note, I've been involved in volunteer organizations that lived by computer hardware donations (UC Berkeley Open Computing Facility). How much volunteer or foundation efforts go into trying to get freebies from vendors now? This might be highly useful... -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Anthony wrote: To be sure, we'd all appreciate a better budgeting process! - From an IT perspective, all I can say on the subject of leasing is that we've never yet taken machines permanently out of service except occasionally due to failure beyond repair. We have continuous, strong growth in all of our service areas. As a result, as machines age, they eventually change purpose: eg being cycled from the high-performance general application server pool to cover more specialized uses as the next generation takes over in the main server pool. You can visualize it something like this, where groups of new similarly-specced machines are brought in as functional groups: Time T: [A] [B B] ^ ^ main processing pool | mixed services Time T+n: [A] [B B C C C C] ^ new servers added Time T+2n: [A B B] [C C C C D D D D D D D D] ^ older machines moved back to handle other services Time T+3n: [A B B C C C C] [D D D D D D D D E E E E E E E E E E E E E E ....] etc Given a growth pattern where every year requires significantly more total horsepower than the previous, and a lifecycle where we continue to get a lot of mileage out of existing machines for years to come by sliding those machines across the different functional areas, there seems to be very little interest in leasing instead of simply purchasing up-front. The only benefit I see to leasing would be to lower the initial costs, allowing money to be spent elsewhere in the short term, but it's not clear that would apply to our business model as a non-profit: a) To date, we're said to be taking in most of our money through fundraisers made for the express purpose of spending it this way -- we wouldn't have the money if we weren't going to spend it on hardware. b) It's not clear what else we _have_ to spend money on other than capital (servers) and operational expenditures (hosting, bandwidth, office, and a few salaries). If we were a for-profit startup, I'd say lease the servers and hire more people, but our current model favors buying servers (easy to drum up donations for) and using chiefly volunteer labor. Disclaimer: I'm just a coder; don't take my word on any financial matters. - -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)