Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

[GerardM]

I th

On 10/26/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 10/26/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > > It might at some point pay to look at selling some of the older
> servers
> > > to buy newer ones. This would have two benefits:
> > >
> > > 1. we are now exclusively buying dual-opterons for apache webserving,
> > > these are significantly more powerful _in the same physical space_
> than
> > > our single-pentiums -- therefore, we can save a lot of rack space at
> the
> > > colo by replacing. (This space is not especially expensive, though, in
> > > the grand scheme of things.)
> > >
> > > 2. In addition to saving physical space, there is a fair amount of dev
> > > time which goes into working with 124 servers (the current count, I
> > > believe, except not all of them are installed just now) which could be
> > > reduced if we were running on half the number of servers. Wikipedia
> > > traffic is growing faster than Moore's Law, but even so, Moore's Law
> > > should make it possible for us to do more with fewer boxes.
> > >
> > > The first benefit can be quantified, the second cannot. (How much
> money
> > > should we be willing to spend to save the developers some time? My
> > > answer is: a LOT. Developer time is not free to us, it is infinitely
> > > expensive. What I mean by that is that it is a lot more cost effective
> > > to have volunteer devs working in a well-funded and exciting
> environment
> > > where they can play with cutting-edge technology, than it is to
> > > eventually be forced to hire devs to work with boring and annoying old
> > > hardware.)
> > >
> > > ----
> > >
> > > My suspicion is that by the time we are seriously ready to get rid of
> > > some old machines, they will have minimal market value. Dunno.
> >
> > If that is the case, then we could donate the machines to other free
> > content/software projects that are still much, much smaller than us.
> >
> > -- mav
>
>
> Or to schools without internet access, with Wikipedia pre-installed. :)
>
> By the way, I have to take issue with the statement that volunteer
> developer
> time is infinitely expensive. At the most it's slightly less expensive
> than
> the cost to hire someone to do the task (and c'mon, who wouldn't want to
> work for Wikimedia?). Otherwise, we're doing something wrong.


Hoi,
When you hire someone, you hire a "professional" he/she is a payed hack it
does not mean he is good or better and it does not mean he/she does have the
same involvement with what we do. We do not have the resources to hire
people, developers are a rare commodity for us and therefore they are truly
expensive. As to us doing something "wrong"; yes we do not have the money to
spend on development and there are several people that are of the opinion
that we should not even consider paying for development.
Thanks,
GerardM