[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation 2008-2009 Annual Plan

[Thomas Dalton]

> I can't agree with Sue that not spending money until it's "needed" is
> a good thing, unless by "needed" she means more like "useful".  But
> then, that must be what she means, because she agrees that finally
> hiring another dev is a "good thing".

I think the comment about not spending money until it's needed was in
reference to hardware, rather than people - she explained that at
least part of the reason for not hiring new staff was the need to get
the new office sorted out first. For hardware, I don't think there is
much time between "useful" and "needed". When we start to run out of
servers we'll start to see the site slowing down and downtime being
more frequent. I expect that we would reach unacceptable levels pretty
quickly after that, so new servers would be needed. The servers would
serve little purpose before we start to have problems - you can't
speed things up beyond a certain level by just throwing money at it.

It's important to remember, of course, that the accounts that have
just been published are for the period ending a year ago - much has
happen in that year, so they shouldn't be relied on to describe the
current state of the foundation.