[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

[Anthony]

On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > For something that huge though, bittorrent seems like a much smarter
> > choice, especially if others could be convinced to act as seeds.
>
> We just need to frame it as a form of donation (which it is): "If you
> can't donate time or money to Wikimedia, please donate a little of
> your bandwidth by becoming a BitTorrent seed."
>
> HTTP is preferable as BitTorrent has a couple of problems. One problem
> with using BitTorrent is that end-users will need to download and set
> up software to receive the files.

Yes, and thus bittorrent is certainly not the solution for most files.
 But most files aren't a gigabyte in size, either!  In terms of cost
vs. convenience, I think you've gotta draw a line somewhere, and I'd
say at the moment a gigabyte sized file is way over that line.

Of course, personally I prefer bittorrent for any file which takes
more than 5 minutes or so to download, if for no other reason than
that Firefox doesn't support "resume download".

> If seeders drop off, the file will be unavailable for a time.

[[Super-seeding]] is a possibility if the WMF wants to pick up that
slack.  Of course the best answer is to have seeders always available
:).

> How will we interface our official
> BitTorrent downloads with our current file description pages?
>
With a .torrent file?

Again, I really saw this as the exception for insanely huge files
rather than the rule, and was comparing it to the solution of just not
hosting the file at all.

Anthony