On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 11:35:46AM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Why if Verio has moved our sites to you, are they still charging us $6,000 > per annum for hosting? > What is the viability of this server? > With the CA economy in dire straits, how secure is your future?
FreeBSD isn't a for-profit corporation in the usual sense. It's
rather a world-wide collection of volunteers with a common aim: to
produce the FreeBSD operating system. As such it is much more
resilient than any business. Furthermore, as FreeBSD is an open
source operating system, there's no possibility that the operating
system itself will disappear, even if the current project membership
does decide to give up and do something else. There are hundreds of
thousands of copies of the FreeBSD source code all round the Internet,
and the BSD license terms specifically allow any usage of that code,
commercial or otherwise so long as the appropriate copyright
statements are maintained.
Neither is the project particularly centered in or dependent on
California. True, there are quite a few FreeBSD committers resident in
that state, and major parts of the FreeBSD web infrastructure are
located there. Not all, however. For example, one of the servers
that makes up ftp.freebsd.org is actually located in Denmark. If
California were to finally fall into the sea, the FreeBSD project
would still go on.
Verio may have moved their hosting business to use FreeBSD, which will
certainly have reduced their per-server licencing costs, yes.
However, that would only have been a small part of their cost base
before moving over. The majority of the cost will be the running
expenses of the hosting centers and the cost of bandwidth, both of
which remain unchanged. If you don't think you're getting value for
money, then you can vote with your feet, or threaten to, and see if
they'll negociate.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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