On 3 July 2010 18:29, Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hm, well, I think this gets back to David
Goodman's point, one which I agree
with.
Yes, the only absolute commitment the WMF has in the grand scheme of things
is to provide the physical resource to host the projects. However, this all
began as a side project on Bomis servers. If it had gone belly up before
the Foundation was established, volunteers would have forked the content and
found other hosting providers, not just tossed in the towel. I think it is
fair to say that volunteers would still do this- locate and finance the
resources independently. It would cause splintering, because of anticipated
control issues,and all that comes with forks and the prongs each being
pointy.
I guess my point is that ultimately I would rather see the WMF focus on
using its resources to provide free educational materials as actively as
possible and disseminating them as far as possible rather than build a war
chest. If the shit were to hit the fan, volunteers would still step up.
When Bomis was hosting it, it was just a handful of servers.
Volunteers wouldn't be able to fork the site and keep things going at
anywhere near the level they are at now - if the WMF doesn't have the
funds, neither will the community. You can't host a top 5 website on a
server in your spare room.