On Feb 6, 2008 11:36 AM, Soxred93(a)gmail.com <soxred93(a)gmail.com> wrote: Doubtful. A legal copy of Windows (so you can get the updates) can be secured as well as Linux, at least assuming the administrator is equally skilled in managing both. That's not a very good rationale against using it.

If it just boils down to "I feel cozy using C# on windows and never had a look at mono", then I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it for me. I had to acquire a considerable amount of expertise and put in a substantial amount of time to do the stuff I'm doing on the toolserver. Shelling out even one dollar just because someone is to lazy (sorry) to learn new things seems unacceptable to me.

What makes you rightful to say in other words that Windows programmers are lazy slackers? Who are you?

On Feb 7, 2008 10:18 AM, Danny B. <Wikipedia.Danny.B(a)email.cz> wrote: There are those of us who do believe that reliance upon proprietary software is in fact damaging, contrary to Wikimedia's mission, and perhaps even wrong. That would indeed make us reject "equal rights" for Windows users, just as it would make us reject equal rights for those who don't want to GFDL their Wikipedia contributions. This is not, however, an issue on the toolservers, because neither those who own them nor those who run them are sympathetic to that point of view. Either way, that question is explicitly off-topic here, although I wouldn't mind debating it with you elsewhere. The question is whether getting a Windows server is worth the cost. So far we have one person who has concretely said he would be interested in moving his application to a Windows toolserver. That project is already running on a private Windows server and will presumably continue to do so even if a Windows toolserver is not provided (or at least, we were told nothing to the contrary). I'm not clear, either, on whether that code would run anyway under Mono with no modifications -- the fifth post in this thread was by River, saying that Windows vs. Mono "shouldn't make any difference as far as i know" for running C#/.NET. The base cost is at least $400, for a one-CPU license -- this allows multicore, by the way, so that's unlikely to be a big problem. At $6/user, the per-user licensing cost seems likely to run to at least one or two hundred dollars more per year, unless it's very unpopular (in which case that's an argument against bothering in itself). So that means at least $500-600/year, if I'm correct in assuming that the $400 base is also per year. (If it's one-time, that seems like fairly remarkable pricing, I'm pretty sure lower than a copy of Vista Home Premium and Office, so I think I'm correct.) It might be higher if some cost was forgotten or misunderstood, but it's maybe also possible to get a lower price from some other supplier. If this figure is correct, I think it's fair to say that to justify the cost, we would need at least one useful thing that would be run on the toolserver that we are fairly certain would not be run otherwise. That's just as a minimum, to justify the expense and the effort. Preferably you'd think there should be more than one thing. But as far as I can tell, nobody has yet come up with even one thing, so based on the response so far, it doesn't seem that there's anything that's been suggested yet that would justify this. Is there any disagreement on the last two paragraphs? _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list Toolserver-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l

------------ Původní zpráva ------------ Od: Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> Předmět: Re: [Toolserver-l] Windows toolserver Datum: 07.2.2008 17:36:11 ----------------------------------------

The question is whether getting a Windows server is worth the cost. So far we have one person who has concretely said he would be interested in moving his application to a Windows toolserver. That project is already running on a private Windows server and will presumably continue to do so even if a Windows toolserver is not provided (or at least, we were told nothing to the contrary). I'm not clear, either, on whether that code would run anyway under Mono with no modifications -- the fifth post in this thread was by River, saying that Windows vs. Mono "shouldn't make any difference as far as i know" for running C#/.NET. The base cost is at least $400, for a one-CPU license -- this allows multicore, by the way, so that's unlikely to be a big problem. At $6/user, the per-user licensing cost seems likely to run to at least one or two hundred dollars more per year, unless it's very unpopular (in which case that's an argument against bothering in itself). So that means at least $500-600/year, if I'm correct in assuming that the $400 base is also per year. (If it's one-time, that seems like fairly remarkable pricing, I'm pretty sure lower than a copy of Vista Home Premium and Office, so I think I'm correct.) It might be higher if some cost was forgotten or misunderstood, but it's maybe also possible to get a lower price from some other supplier. If this figure is correct, I think it's fair to say that to justify the cost, we would need at least one useful thing that would be run on the toolserver that we are fairly certain would not be run otherwise. That's just as a minimum, to justify the expense and the effort. Preferably you'd think there should be more than one thing. But as far as I can tell, nobody has yet come up with even one thing, so based on the response so far, it doesn't seem that there's anything that's been suggested yet that would justify this. Is there any disagreement on the last two paragraphs?

the entire point of this discussion was to find out whether it will provide a benefit to users (by producing more tools). that is why i asked people to refrain from discussing whether or not we should considering deploying Windows; there's no point doing that until we can see an actual need for it.