Still doesn't work. And yes, it needs an executive level decision, and it needs a kick in the ass from the board to get the executive level to make that decision.
That work is being done at the moment, I'd think that it is being handled properly. On the other hand, I'm no longer in position of judging that from above, and can enjoy fully not caring ;-)
I'll believe it when I see it. AFAICT, the dumps still don't work, and you still haven't hired a new CTO.
How many millions of dollars were left unspent by the tech team a couple years ago?
How many?
1.7
Why are you looking for faults?
The first step in fixing a problem is identifying the faults.
CTO had to operate under constraints set by financial management, financial management was done based on conservative non-profit operation model.
The CTO came up with a budget. He submitted that budget. That budget was accepted. Then the money which was budgeted went unspent, while glaring problems which required spending remained.
You can't have a bunch of people adding little things here and there and expect a working product, and it's unrealistic to expect someone to take charge of this sort of thing for free, especially in the current economy.
You seem to have entirely failing understanding of motivation technology volunteers can have.
It's not a matter of motivation, it's a matter of reality. If you're going to limit your selection to people who are independently wealthy, you're not going to get as many qualified individuals for the task. If there are people willing and able to fix the dumps for free, and you can find them and give them the tools they need to do it, fine. But that didn't happen, and *in this particular case*, it's probably unrealistic. Three years ago, before the economy went into the crapper, you probably could have found someone to do it. I probably would have even done it myself, if someone had given me access to the servers so I could do it. What I remember from the time is that the story was always "this is being worked on", not "we need someone to volunteer to redesign this". Actually I was under the impression then that you didn't really want to fix the dumps - remember this was during the beginning of the oversight days. But today it's probably tougher finding qualified individuals willing and able to do it for free.
Whatever. Whether it's done for free or for a price isn't what's important. What's important is that it gets done.
We have amazing project work done on search by Robert, toolserver
operation by River, do note, how much work on CDN infrastructure that was done by Mark, or simply all the work done before by Brion and Tim.
Have any of these people fixed the dumps? Maybe if the current system wasn't written in Python you could have found someone to do this, but as it was, it simply wasn't a task which anyone was motivated to do for free. "Let's just wait a few years and see if someone turns up" isn't the answer to that problem. "Let's spend a little of this 1.7 million we have sitting in a bank account doing nothing" is.