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  • From: Stephanie Gerson <sgerson@stanfordalumni.org>
  • To: <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] synthesis[13][8.22.04]
  • Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 10:09:29 -0700

John S.,

You don't have time for any more unpaid work on this project, but I'm sure
neither of us do ;)

And since you have claimed that there are other free/cheap hosting services
out there, and used that as an argument against needing to go with Ibiblio,
I'd appreciate it if you could subtantiate the claim. Shouldn't take too
long, especially if you already know about these services!

I'll respond more in-depth later...

peace
*Stephanie

John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net> wrote:

Aloha,

> ...let’s go with “Permaculture
> Information Web” for hg, and plan that it will be part of the “Open
> Permaculture Project” (which PFAF, Eden, and Lawrence’s website will
> hopefully be part of too!) in the future…

OK by me.

> So, it appears that the most satisfactory compromise is that we go with
> ZOPE on arashi while I solicit further funding to donate a server for
> Ibiblio...
> ...Do all of you agree with this?

If you find funding that can only be used for such purposes, and not
used to pay ourselves or fund eventual other aspects of our project, I
would not block it.

If you spend time doing that that takes away at all significantly from
finding funding we can use to pay ourselves, or fund eventual other
aspects of our project, I do not support that.

In short, I don't see why we would want to put much effort towards
buying ibiblio an expensive server that *they* will own and administer
and share with others for free after we've (you in particular Stephanie)
done the work to pay for it.

Please do the math again - one server at $6K+ is almost ELEVEN (11)
YEARS of hosting! (that's 742 years in internet time... ;-)
Either way we own nothing when that money is spent, so the rent vs. buy
argument doesn't apply here.

Imagine an actual business situation - imagine trying to pitch this to a
savvy business manager: "OK, here's the deal. We do the work to get
money to buy some expensive hardware for someone else to own and run.
For however long they're around and amenable, we get to use a portion of
it, on their terms, and they'll be letting other people use it for free.
Sounds great, doesn't it, boss? Just sign here to authorize the
contract."

Not bloody likely!!
..unless the business manager was
a) thoroughly incompetent
b) completely clueless
c) about to be looking for another job
d) all of the above

And if so, would we want to:
> a) take out a loan from PCU to buy the server now, and pay for it with
> funds we receive in the future?

Absolutely not.

> b) not take out a loan, and wait until we have received further grants/
> donations in or to buy the server?

See response above to idea of buying someone else a server.

> ‡ John S. wrote, “I'll spend the time to find some other possible
> academic/institutional "free" hosts if/when someone else spends the time
> to answer my non-trivial questions about the long-term viability of
> ibiblio.” Actually, it would be helpful if you could spend this time now

> – I think Lawrence would gladly answer your questions about the long-term

> viability of Ibiblio.

I'd rather hear it from someone more impartial, frankly. Don't know who
that would be. I already know Lawrence's beliefs about ibiblio.

> I know there are hosts who offer good/free deals
> to non-profits, such as Laughing Squid.

And for open source projects - johncompanies.com for example has a 40%
discount on hosting fees for systems hosting open source projects.

> I’m taking the liberty of adding
> this to your tasks, John – assigning tasks is a perk of dealing with the
> project plan, I guess ;)

I have no time for more unpaid work on this project.
I might poke around a bit in three or four weeks as I will have some
unfettered high-speed access at my disposal.

> ‡ John S. wrote, “Also on hosting - we don't even know if we can host
our
> issue tracker on ibiblio yet, never mind zope!” Hmm?? If this is a
> concern that’s going to seriously affect our ability to use ZOPE or work
> with Ibiblio, we need to figure this out. Can you please elaborate?

Doesn't affect zope or anything else.
Their response to my query about bugzilla on ibiblio was:

"We do not run a global installation of bugzilla, but you are free to
install and run it from your own directory on ibiblio."

Whether or not that is actually possible to do is not clear to me. I
have asked John H. to get with them on the back-end requirements for
bugzilla. Bugzilla uses MySQL for back end DB and has certain
configuration requirements that may or may not be possible to achieve,
depending on what sort of directory and user privileges they would give us.

If it's not possible, there's that darn hosting issue again.
Perhaps we could leave it on John H.'s system.
Perhaps there are some free bugzilla providers out there somewhere.

One reason John H. went with johncompanies.com as his infrastructure
provider is that he gets a full virtual machine - he is root/sysadmin
and can do anything he wants with his system, so lots of issues that
arise in being a shared user of a shared machine (Laughing Squid,
ibiblio, etc.) and not having root privileges simply vanish.

> John S. also wrote, “XML being the Esperanto wannabe of cross-platform
> data transmission, anything worth considering as a platform will need to
> have XML generating capabilities” – does ZOPE have these capabilities?

Yep.

> **Please respond to the plan I suggested above, and whether you would
> like to pursue option a) or b).

Done above.

> John S. asked about the $15/hour figure, and seemed (understandably!)
> displeased.

Well, not displeased, mostly curious, because...

> When I was creating the budget for the grant proposal, I
> posted messages to the list asking about wages and what would be
> reasonable. I think no one responded except for Rich.

I responded somewhere back there...that's why I was wondering where $15
came from.
I would work on HG for $15/hr., though if I have other paying work at
other "real world" rates it will get priority most of the time.

> I also remember
> not wanting to spend too much on wages, for fear that it wouldn’t look
> too good (I decided this after speaking with someone from the Threshold
> Foundation about budget etiquette). So, I apologize if you are
> dissatisfied with the wage. But. As I mentioned in a previous post, the
> Threshold Foundation doesn’t limit how much money can be spent on wages

Apparently some (most?) grantors do, however?
This is a bit of a funding issue if our main expense is paying ourselves
and we can only get money to spend on other stuff that we don't have
much or any of in this project.
Hopefully there are grantors who do support paid work.
There must be some, becaues one of my clients lives on and pays me and
other contractors with grants to their NPO. Whoops, make that two such
clients now that I think of it - another one just got a grant-funded NPO
coordinator job and can pay contractors from that budget to some extent.

> A few quick notes:
> ‡ Did the two Johns ever figure out the Bugzilla issue?

If you mean on ibiblio, finding out is in progress.

If you mean customization to suit me, the chief test curmudgeon better,
also still in progress. And we can use it as-is, I just want to see
what's possible to tweak more for our project.

> p.s. What’s IMO?

In My Opinion


--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net
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+++++++++++++++
Stephanie Gerson
sgerson@stanfordalumni.org
(c) 415.871.5683


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