Anthony a écrit :
On 5/20/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 5/19/07, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
Hello,
Anthony a écrit : (...)
But I think the main issue has nothing to do with the IRS. It's a matter of focus. Developing a profitable business competes with the maximum production and distribution of content. Charging maximum prices for data feeds reduces the dissemination of the data. Charging licensing fees to DVD distributors raises the prices of the DVDs and thus reduces the number of DVDs which are distributed. Etc, etc (*).
I think this is false, because we deal with digital and free content.
It is not because you sell a datafeed to one organisation at one prize that you sell it to everybody at the same price. Same logic for DVDs.
Interesting. I don't think that would be feasible for datafeeds though, and I'm pretty sure it isn't feasible for DVDs. In the case of DVDs, if you tried to sell them to different groups for different prices, you'd simply see people resell the DVDs (engage in arbitrage).
Reselling one or two DVD would not be a big deal. However, engaging into a real reselling activity of a DVD using trademarks which you are not authorized to use for a commercial activity, is illegal.
Umm, how so? Check out eBay sometime, or half.com (have they gotten rid of that yet?). People resell DVDs using trademarks which they aren't authorized to use for a commercial activity *all the time*. Besides that, it's most certainly not illegal.
I think this would happen for datafeeds as well, if they were ever accessible to the regular public. If I as an individual could buy an en.wikipedia datafeed for $100/month (which would probably be more than enough to cover WMF's actual costs), the WMF wouldn't be able to charge companies $5000/month, because if they did I'd just step in and resell my $100/month datafeed for much less than $5000.
Yeah, and since your contract agreement at $100 explicitely does not allow you to resell the feed to a third party, you would engage into illegal activity as well.
Then you could sue me, and I'd countersue you for violating the GFDL. What part of "add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License" don't you understand?
If you're currently forcing datafeed recipients to agree not to redistribute the data they receive, then you're in major breach of the GFDL. Not just the relatively minor breaches that have been going on for so long, but you've subverting the very essence of copyleft.
I seriously hope your current contracts don't do that.
And I think the WMF *should* be willing to sell unrestricted datafeeds to *anyone* for little more than its actual costs. This is in line with maximizing the useful distribution of free content, which is after all the purpose of the WMF.
Datafeed is one of the way we can make money. Which will allow us to pay the accountant. Which will allow us to provide all the financial information you are noisily requesting.
The millions of dollars in donations you've collected is another way to pay an accountant.
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
- Should we develop some banners (http://www2.redcross.org/psa/bannerorder/all/) and ask bloggers and site owners to add donation ads to websites ? - Should we do like Firefox (http://www.firefoxgotyourback.com/), but ask people to pay to "be a pixel" ;)
If you count in "actual cost" uniquely the bandwidth cost, $100 could make it. But running an organization uniquely counting as cost, the bandwidth, is seriously being out of it.
The organization is going to be run regardless of whether or not the datafeed is given. Counting all the costs of running the organization when calculating the marginal cost of providing a datafeed, is seriously being out of it.
Anthony
Pierre
On 5/20/07, Pierre Beaudouin pierre.beaudouin@wikimedia.fr wrote:
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
That argument would have more validity if the foundation showed that is was paying some attention to say:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_ideas
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.com_draft didn't appear to have dropped of the radar.
- Should we develop some banners
(http://www2.redcross.org/psa/bannerorder/all/) and ask bloggers and site owners to add donation ads to websites ?
- Should we do like Firefox (http://www.firefoxgotyourback.com/), but
ask people to pay to "be a pixel" ;)
This can be considered as soon as the foundation gives clearance to use it's IP in this way.
On 5/20/07, Pierre Beaudouin pierre.beaudouin@wikimedia.fr wrote:
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
First step is to publicly distribute monthly financial statements and a detailed budget which minimizes unnecessary costs. The rest of the details really come from how much if any shortfall results from that. I suspect there won't be any, so long as the budget really does minimize unnecessary costs. Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
Anthony
Please Anthony, stop being a troll. You are being completely ignorant and rude.
On 20/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 5/20/07, Pierre Beaudouin pierre.beaudouin@wikimedia.fr wrote:
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
First step is to publicly distribute monthly financial statements and a detailed budget which minimizes unnecessary costs. The rest of the details really come from how much if any shortfall results from that. I suspect there won't be any, so long as the budget really does minimize unnecessary costs. Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
Anthony
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Sun, May 20, 2007 13:26, Robert Leverington wrote:
Please Anthony, stop being a troll. You are being completely ignorant and rude.
Seconded.
On 20/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
Leasing equipment is what you do when you need the option to be able to cancel it should trading conditions turn against you and you no longer need the equipment (which is not the case with WMF - we *know* that our usage will continue to increase not decrease) -or- you want to be able to mark down the lease / interest payments against your tax liability, again which does not apply to WMF.
As Robert got to saying first, please be constructive and don't troll.
Alison Wheeler
Thirded, but I think it is quite obvious from my responses to Anthony that I think he is a troll.
Cbrown1023
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Alison Wheeler Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 9:03 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in business development
On Sun, May 20, 2007 13:26, Robert Leverington wrote:
Please Anthony, stop being a troll. You are being completely ignorant and rude.
Seconded.
On 20/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
Leasing equipment is what you do when you need the option to be able to cancel it should trading conditions turn against you and you no longer need the equipment (which is not the case with WMF - we *know* that our usage will continue to increase not decrease) -or- you want to be able to mark down the lease / interest payments against your tax liability, again which does not apply to WMF.
As Robert got to saying first, please be constructive and don't troll.
Alison Wheeler
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Alison Wheeler wrote:
On Sun, May 20, 2007 13:26, Robert Leverington wrote:
Please Anthony, stop being a troll. You are being completely ignorant and rude.
Seconded.
On 20/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
Leasing equipment is what you do when you need the option to be able to cancel it should trading conditions turn against you and you no longer need the equipment (which is not the case with WMF - we *know* that our usage will continue to increase not decrease) -or- you want to be able to mark down the lease / interest payments against your tax liability, again which does not apply to WMF.
Yes and no. Leasing companies like to bind their clients for the life of the contract whether or not you need the equipment. Having an option to cancel on short notice (30 days or less) will likely imply higher monthly payments. ... but then I don't like leasing in either event.
As Robert got to saying first, please be constructive and don't troll.
Anthony has raised some points that absolutely need to be discussed, but which unfortunately involve themes that are familiar to only a very few people. I regret the accusatory tone which sometimes creeps into his comments, but I believe that his analyses are important even if personally I often disagree with them.
Ec
On 5/20/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Alison Wheeler wrote:
On 20/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
Leasing equipment is what you do when you need the option to be able to cancel it should trading conditions turn against you and you no longer need the equipment (which is not the case with WMF - we *know* that our usage will continue to increase not decrease) -or- you want to be able to mark down the lease / interest payments against your tax liability, again which does not apply to WMF.
Yes and no. Leasing companies like to bind their clients for the life of the contract whether or not you need the equipment. Having an option to cancel on short notice (30 days or less) will likely imply higher monthly payments. ... but then I don't like leasing in either event.
There are situations where leasing is a clear net win. One of them is an organization with no capital of note, but a steady income (or donations) stream over time - you can get many more servers earlier by leasing than you could by paying as you go, though the cost per server over a long time period is higher. Assuming that the organization is a growing going concern, then the servers/time curve can be plotted versus fraction of the organization's total budget going in to those servers, for periods of order of the lease lifetime, and see what the overall impact is.
On a tangental note, I've been involved in volunteer organizations that lived by computer hardware donations (UC Berkeley Open Computing Facility). How much volunteer or foundation efforts go into trying to get freebies from vendors now? This might be highly useful...
Anthony wrote:
On 5/20/07, Pierre Beaudouin pierre.beaudouin@wikimedia.fr wrote:
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
First step is to publicly distribute monthly financial statements and a detailed budget which minimizes unnecessary costs.
Sure, better financial reporting would help; quarterly would be adequate. Good budgetting practice would also bring transparency to the situation. Opaque finances only too easily makes people suspicious even where there is no real cause to be suspicious.
The rest of the details really come from how much if any shortfall results from that. I suspect there won't be any, so long as the budget really does minimize unnecessary costs.
That all depends on how you define unnecessary costs. A grest deal of setting budgets depends on informed guesswork. It involves allowing for some margin of error in our guesses. The more optimistic assumptions should indeed project a shortfall, but that would also include wishlist expenditures that can easily be dropped if revenue expectations are not met.
Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
I've already expressed my disagreement with you on that. Leasing is only the better option when your blinders limit your perspective to short term cash flow. Things are quite different when you think in terms of a three plus year plan.
Ec
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Anthony wrote:
On 5/20/07, Pierre Beaudouin wrote:
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
First step is to publicly distribute monthly financial statements and a detailed budget which minimizes unnecessary costs. The rest of the details really come from how much if any shortfall results from that.
To be sure, we'd all appreciate a better budgeting process!
I suspect there won't be any, so long as the budget really does minimize unnecessary costs. Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
- From an IT perspective, all I can say on the subject of leasing is that we've never yet taken machines permanently out of service except occasionally due to failure beyond repair.
We have continuous, strong growth in all of our service areas. As a result, as machines age, they eventually change purpose: eg being cycled from the high-performance general application server pool to cover more specialized uses as the next generation takes over in the main server pool.
You can visualize it something like this, where groups of new similarly-specced machines are brought in as functional groups:
Time T: [A] [B B] ^ ^ main processing pool | mixed services
Time T+n: [A] [B B C C C C] ^ new servers added
Time T+2n: [A B B] [C C C C D D D D D D D D] ^ older machines moved back to handle other services
Time T+3n: [A B B C C C C] [D D D D D D D D E E E E E E E E E E E E E E ....] etc
Given a growth pattern where every year requires significantly more total horsepower than the previous, and a lifecycle where we continue to get a lot of mileage out of existing machines for years to come by sliding those machines across the different functional areas, there seems to be very little interest in leasing instead of simply purchasing up-front.
The only benefit I see to leasing would be to lower the initial costs, allowing money to be spent elsewhere in the short term, but it's not clear that would apply to our business model as a non-profit:
a) To date, we're said to be taking in most of our money through fundraisers made for the express purpose of spending it this way -- we wouldn't have the money if we weren't going to spend it on hardware.
b) It's not clear what else we _have_ to spend money on other than capital (servers) and operational expenditures (hosting, bandwidth, office, and a few salaries).
If we were a for-profit startup, I'd say lease the servers and hire more people, but our current model favors buying servers (easy to drum up donations for) and using chiefly volunteer labor.
Disclaimer: I'm just a coder; don't take my word on any financial matters.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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