2008/2/7 Danny B. Wikipedia.Danny.B@email.cz:
I never heard about yearly payment for MS software unless you lease it. It's been pointed out these are prices for non-profits, so it's obvious they are much cheaper then retail or even OEM version. Thus I'd take them as +- final.
Well, I was just surprised that MS would sell a copy of Windows Server 2003 and MS SQL Server to a non-profit for, I think, less than they would sell Vista and Office . . . to that same non-profit. Or do their non-server products also give discounts to nonprofits?
I strongly disagree with setting things in the way "Could it be run elsewhere? Then it should not be on Windows."
I support that attitude in general for Wikimedia, but it's been said it's not relevant to the toolserver and in particular is not relevant to this discussion, so there's no reason to talk about it further.
This leads to my other disagreement, which is about sentences like: "nobody showed the tools = no need for wints". I am pretty sure there is bunch of Windows programmers out there who don't participate with their brains because they simply don't have a conditions to. I'd say if there was a Windows toolserver it would attract other people with new ideas and tools, because they will have an opportunity to do so.
Sure, quite possibly -- I'm just saying that it seems like a bad idea to spend money belonging to either the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its local chapters on a new OS if you have don't have reason to believe it will actually give any benefit to Wikimedia users. It seems logical to me to say that you should at least have one project that will run only if we have a Windows toolserver, because otherwise I don't see any benefit to anyone. The toolserver enables people to run tools if they either don't have their own server space or really need database access; that's basically the only benefit to anyone.
I guess you could argue that it's inevitable someone will want to use it eventually, for some app they wouldn't have otherwise written. It just seems sensible to me to find that person *before* you pay a few hundred dollars, rather than paying it and only then waiting for him to turn up.
Also thanks to Sebmol who pointed out that every single person is master of its time. So, please, don't tell people to waste an hour of their free time to create one tool if they can utilize the same hour to create five tools. The world isn't single colored. We have wide palette of programming/scripting languages and different people are familiar with different languages. I am not pushing you to use those I use, don't push me to use those you use.
This is, again, off-topic. I'll respond off-list.