On 2/18/07, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Have you been paying attention lately; our costs and our traffic are growing exponentially. We do not have a rosy balance sheet as it is. Users will be extremely unhappy when we are not able to continue to provide our service.
Costs are growing exponentially, but so is income. Wikipedia has enough money to continue operations. It's not going to disappear due to hardware costs, as a board member has recently stated: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-February/027762.html. Notice the emphasis on needing to get more money, not needing to use cheaper hardware.
If you think that a SETI@home-style computing model for a high-load webpage-serving application is practicable, could you point to a single example of anyone pulling this off successfully? Specifically, concerns over trustworthiness (how do we stop agents from putting ads or other content on their copies?) and latency (needs to be routed through extra servers) appear insuperable.