On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Tim Landscheidttim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
Why? If a chapter can pay a hosting company for their servi- ces with a donation, they should be able to pay WMDE for their services as well. There is no need to "move a donation to another jurisdiction".
My understanding (IANAL anywhere, especially not Europe) is that they can let WM-DE host and manage the servers, but they might not be able to just give them to WM-DE. Charities can't necessarily give away assets to non-charities, otherwise there would be an obvious loophole in the whole "not for profit" idea (accept donation, give away to for-profit corporation you own, pocket as profit).
So we'd have a lot of servers owned by a lot of different foundations in different countries. If you need new hardware for this server you have to get the money from this person, for this server you need this person. You get a dozen different support contracts and warranties instead of one per vendor/manufacturer. I don't deal with the hardware at all, but it looks like enough of a pain for the admins to just have to deal with servers owned by one or two groups.
So it would be nice if one organization could own all the servers and manage all the support contracts. Like Wikimedia Deutschland. But apparently that's not easy to do, either legally or politically.