[Toolserver-l] The Norwegian toolserver

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Tim Landscheidt<tim at tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:
> Why? If a chapter can pay a hosting company for their servi-
> ces with a donation, they should be able to pay WMDE for
> their services as well. There is no need to "move a donation
> to another jurisdiction".

My understanding (IANAL anywhere, especially not Europe) is that they
can let WM-DE host and manage the servers, but they might not be able
to just give them to WM-DE.  Charities can't necessarily give away
assets to non-charities, otherwise there would be an obvious loophole
in the whole "not for profit" idea (accept donation, give away to
for-profit corporation you own, pocket as profit).

So we'd have a lot of servers owned by a lot of different foundations
in different countries.  If you need new hardware for this server you
have to get the money from this person, for this server you need this
person.  You get a dozen different support contracts and warranties
instead of one per vendor/manufacturer.  I don't deal with the
hardware at all, but it looks like enough of a pain for the admins to
just have to deal with servers owned by one or two groups.

So it would be nice if one organization could own all the servers and
manage all the support contracts.  Like Wikimedia Deutschland.  But
apparently that's not easy to do, either legally or politically.