On 7/29/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
mboverload wrote:
I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands other than
the immediate foundation. A company that leases servers may easily give in
to legal challenges or other backhanded threats. We'd have to have legal
advice about how this would effect the lawsuit situation and consider what
we would be giving up.
Leasing does not necesarily mean going through an existing for-profit
leasing company. Many of them would certainly give cause to your
discomfort. A totally new company established for the purpose of
leasing back the hardware would do just fine. Whatever contractual
arrangements are made could reflect the values of the community and a
break even business plan.
It seems rather far fetched to me that a company with a big leasing
contract like this is going to just decide to break its contract and
confiscate its servers. I mean, it'd be easier for someone to
threaten the ISPs providing the bandwidth (which might very well be
willing to provide a reasonable leasing contract themselves). Add in
a few different leasing companies and it's even more far fetched.
And even if the leased servers did get confiscated, the whole point of
leasing is that not a whole lot would be lost. The site would
obviously suffer some downtime in this highly unlikely scenario, of
course.
Anthony