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Right. Time for us
all to put our money to work. I just wanted to delurk long enough to Michael Jennings and the cAos foundation a large "Booyah!". I am now off to donate some cash. Mik Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:29:32 -0500 Michael Jennings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> babbled:OK - This is a summary reply to this thread so far, as there are a lot of mails, answering each one is not going to be easy - I'll summarise here. "Tell us where to donate and we will" - well for over a year now there has been a donate butotn on www.enlightenment.org - on the left side, see where it says in an image icon "put your money where your mouth is - support us" - there. we have been registered for the ef.net donation system for a while now. donations are pretty sparse and small - maybe people just don't notice. but you CAN donate. currently donations go into a paypal account KITTY run by Nathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. We have been letting funds accumulate a bit to maybe one day afford something like this. So how - either donate DIRECTLY via Paypal to [EMAIL PROTECTED], or if you don't trust that donate vis sf.net's donation system and let them have their cut (we won't see all the money then). i think they take 5% from memory and paypal have fees too. "25GB of traffic isn't much" - Well sure. Fileserving isn't. If it's CVS where it has to process a lot - svn too, then it puts load. Also thats only thinktux, and that may go up over time too. Also remember it will come in spikes - so provisioning for them is a good idea. "I'll help donate" - FANTASTIC! The response has been very positive so far and I am pleasantly surprised with it. This is great. of course we will want to post more prominently to annouce lists, on the website, get-e.org, edevelop.org etc., but this is a good indicator of people lisitening in the last 24hrs and those reading and responding to their email. You don't need to run and donate right now - we should first still decide if this IS the right option for us and then how much it wil cost us to set up. Ongoing costs are simply hardware maintenance and people's time spent administering the system. "I can help administer" - Great! We need to spread the work and responsability. We likely will give access to those people who have been KNOWN to be "hanging around" for a long time and are enthusiastic and dependable. We can't have 100 admins - too many cooks, so if you are not chosen - be happy. Less work to do. But we will need a core team of peolpe who have good clue to make sure security updates do get installed, help set up and fix/update services run etc. "Google ads bring in $x/month" - Good point Handy. It's a server. It doesn't last forever. Eventually hard drives die. We can maintain the system in 2 ways. 1. Keep asking for donations so we can keep filling the kitty for repairse, or 2. put up unobtrusive google ads like get-e.org. On sf.net we simply are not allowed to do this. Some poeple abhor ads and will tell us we suck for putting them up. Ok - point made. Will those same people then donate money instead every year? The choices are - machine falls apart eventually and CVS etc. go away, OR we pester peolpe for donations, OR we just slowly build up kitty funds via ads over time. IF we move www.enlightenment.org to our own server and collect minimal advertising funds to just keep it alive - i hope we don't offend too many people. As Handy pointed out - it's not a lot of $ - but over a year it adds up to enough to buy replacement drives when they die etc. "enlightenment.org is slow" - We can't do much - It's hosted on sf.net and hoevere fast it is - is how fast e.org will be. If we run our own server we have a bit more control - but also we have fewer freidns to help push up the service quality of the network overall. We likely can't be putting sites everywhere (in the USA, UK, Japan, China, India, etc.). We could definitely have the option of local mirrors for speedier access in the future. Though I say I am in Japan and enlightenment.org isn't too bad. Maybe you forget the days of 14.4k modems... :) "Where will the server be" - We have a tentative offer of hosting at: http://osuosl.org/ It's in Oregon, USA. Free bandwidth - free rackspace, power and minimal administration as needed to be done by the lab. We can and likely will administer our own box and simply give them root password info as a courtesy in case poo hits the fan and they need it. "I can't donate to paypal - I live in Lebanon" - That is a problem. You can do international wire transfers to a friend and have them donate for you, But beware - such transfers costs a lot - from $10-$60 to do the transfer so you may spend more in wire transfer fees than the donation itself. "There are other resources we can use instead of our own server" - Very good point. I agree - in fact that is what we have been doing. What I am afraid of though is - we use someones services - greatfully, but then their manager decides to make the box sell more web space, or they get fired or quit their job and then the box is in limbo and one day we find ourselves without such services. OK then the solution is to have lots of them- but this multiplies the work as it has to be repeated in N places. If we have our own dedicated hosting we at least are in control off our own destinies until: sf.net vanishes (liklihood - very low) or our free hosting vanishes (low as the lab is dedicated to providing serves to open source to help support it). At least we have 1 server we CAN depend on for offering automatic tarball snapshots, http/ftp file downloads without having to use sf.ne'ts god-waful release system, direct ability to log traffic and info and gather statistics, etc. etc. i agree it sounds wasteful in many ways - but in others it gives us power and access that insulate us more from matters out of our control. donated server resources outside a dedicated one could be useful in handling overload though. that is just my opinion though. "Use SVN!" - That's not a solution. It's a complication. It's EASY to mirror CVs usijng CVSup - but mirror CVS to an svn repository has more complexity and more things to go wrong. Whatever we do run - we'd like to have as few problems as possible. We NEED to mirror CVS at ANY rate. we then need to convert the mirrored CVs tree into something else. Let's get the mirroring working first to solve most people's problems. Adding SVN simply adds confusion and support issues - as develoeprs will use CVSA and users then won't. "CVS is fine - SVN problem" will be your answer most likely. :) "Caos is using OSUOSL - we will help" - Thanks Mej! We might yet take you up on that offer - how is the service ther so far? network ok? maybe in the longer run if we get a box - we can arrange to nfs mount eachother to give better access to files more readily? |
