On 2/18/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)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.