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.
On 7/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 7/27/06, Brad Patrick
<bradp.wmf(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>You have to be kidding. Are you seriously suggesting the Foundation
stop
buying
servers?
I seriously think they should look into leasing them instead.
I don't know if that's necessarily the solution. In the absence of
proper and timely financial statements it is difficult to make an
evaluation from that perspective. We keep hearing about buying more
servers, but precious little is done to project needs on the basis of
the life expectancy of the hardware.
There are also frequent concerns expressed about legal suits that WMF
could be faced with. Even though I feel that at least some of those
concerns are farfetched, good risk management would suggest that ways of
protecting the assets be devised. Developing an arm's length
relationship between the ownership of the assets and any potential
liability would serve us well.
Leasing could be a part of this through a sale and leaseback arrangement
with a separately incorporated for profit company.
The feigned, "You have to be kidding," approach reflects a failure to
properly consider these issues.
Ec
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l