[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 7:24 PM, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at altern.org> wrote:
> Andrew Whitworth a écrit :
>  <snip>
> > Given the choice between shutting the servers down for good, or
>  > displaying some adverstisements (and then we have to define the word
>  > "some" here), I personally would pick the advertisements.
>
>  I would prefer shutting down the servers with a press release issued the
>  day before. The effects would be interesting and I am sure a solution
>  will be found faster than six months of discussions ;-)

Ah, the hidden third option. My big point with that statement was that
I would be willing to put up with a certain amount of "evil" if that
was the only way to keep the servers running. I think there are a lot
of steps that would certainly need to be taken before we did anything
drastic, however. I really have the point of view that the content and
the projects are the most important component of the foundation, and
that they should be kept up at all cost. Of course, "up" is relative,
and there are a lot of features or capabilities that we could freeze
temporary to reduce bandwidth requirements and to stem (at least
temporarily) growth. Also, the foundation has a lot of overhead which
could be jettisoned before the server budgets were under pressure.
Whether the decision-makers would choose to pick the servers over
staff salaries is up to them and not to me.

In the binary choice between servers running and advertisements, I
would choose the ads. However, the world is rarely one of binary
choices. If we get into a situation where the servers are down, or are
going down inevitably, I would call that an "emergency" situation, and
people are prone to making bad decisions in an emergency. We could put
out a distress signal and wait to be bailed out by some other entity
(be it the community donors, large corporate donors, or some other
benefactor), but such a bail-out would happen on their terms, not
ours. Doing something proactive like advertising (which again, isn't
the only proactive option we might potentially have) is, at the very
least, done on our terms under our control. It's a concession that we
would have to make in order to stay out of somebody else's pocket.

--Andrew Whitworth