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

[Anthony DiPierro]

> > 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.


I believe that every job performed by volunteers here could be done by
someone who is paid to do it, with the same exact quality, at *some* price
point. Since there exists a price point, it's not *infinite*. The value of
volunteer labor doing something like maintaining servers can be quantified,
to a very high level of accuracy.

We do not have the resources to hire
> people, developers are a rare commodity for us and therefore they are
> truly
> expensive.


The whole reason this topic came up was to bring up the question of when
does it make sense to buy new servers to replace old ones. So the money to
buy the new servers (minus the savings in hosting costs) is what would be
used to hire those people.

Now look, labor is generally very expensive compared to servers, so the
savings would have to be really tremendous. But Jimbo implied that the cost
of labor was infinite, and not possible to quantify. I was just pointing out
that it's not.

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.


My statement about doing something wrong was qualified with a specific
scenario. I have no idea if it's actually the case, in part because I have
no idea how much volunteer developer time is being spent on various things,
and what those volunteers would be willing to do if they didn't have to
spend that time doing whatever it is they do.

Yes, there are people of the opinion that we should not even consider paying
for development, at any cost. In my opinion these extremists are potentially
very detrimental to the project, and probably have a big overlap with those
who feel we should never have advertising at any cost. Unless they're
suggesting that Wikimedia start feeding and housing some of its volunteers
(which would be kind of neat), money is a requirement for the vast majority
of them.

Unfortunately there's something about money that causes people to get all up
in arms. I see money as little more than a mechanism to facilitate barter. I
guess some people don't even like barter, I really don't understand it
though.