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

[Anthony]

On 1/2/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm sure it won't, just thinking about the future.
>
> It will take us all of 30 minutes to setup a BT link when the time
> comes. Less future more today.
>
I don't see a problem with that strategy, as long as the foundation is
on board with it.  I already expressed my skepticism that allowing a
few of these types of files will make a huge difference in bandwidth
costs.  So if you can convince the management of the foundation to
just go ahead with it, more power to you.  My suggestion of using BT
was mainly an alternative to telling the person to go somewhere else.

That said, the sooner the BT links get set up, the more people that
can be convinced to become seeds ahead of time, before the bandwidth
becomes unbearable.  In that sense, I see no reason not to offer both,
if no one prefers the BT links, then only 30 minutes of time is lost.

> It will be a wonderful problem to have when we find ourselves
> overwealmed with requests. ... It'll be a problem we'll never need to
> worry about if we don't get the content up.
>
> Content must come first.
>
Absolutely agreed.  My suggestion of BT was precisely meant to get the
content up, and to worry about those few people with firewall problems
(BT works perfectly fine through most firewalls), what happens if a
single seed starts getting hit with 10Mbit/sec in requests (get more
seeds), how to encourage people to become seeds for the least seeded
files first (like maybe have a list of the least seeded files), etc.,
first.

In another post you mention download.wikimedia.org.  I think those
files, at least the most popular of them, would be an excellent choice
for *also* offering via bittorrent.  Take the 30 minutes, set up a
server, wait a year or two, and see what happens.  Worst case scenario
no one uses it.

Anthony