Re: [Monotone-devel] No sponsored hardware :(

[Philipp Gröschler]

On 23.08.2010 19:35, Tero Koskinen wrote:
> If we end up buying a VPS for the project how we handle all
> the maintenance things? Do we need to care about the bus factor
> of the maintainer(s)? (What happens if you get hit by a bus,
> spend ten years in a coma, and we need to renew the VPS
> subscription?)

The core developers should share all accounting information, maybe 
through a private section in the Wiki or by other means (snail mail is 
also a lot quicker than it used to be 30 years ago. I'm drifting here).

For the payment there could be some online bank account which has all 
core developers registered as holders. There are lots of offers which 
don't come with an additional fee.

Also the VPS hoster should know that there are several people in charge. 
We once had problems when we shared our dedicated server among a few 
people, the server support refused to speak to anybody except to the one 
who originally sealed the deal, which is not necessarily the person with 
the most available spare time, availability, whatever ;)

(Side note: I wouldn't go as far as establishing some own NPO, that 
usually implies more problems than it solves)

> And how the collection of money happens? Wire transfers
> inside Europe are free (thanks to SEPA), but people outside
> Europe might prefer other ways.

The Flattr-Project seems to work good for a few blogs and websites I 
regularly visit, and Paypal is planning a micropayment system, too. The 
other story is if one likes using those services, but it could be a 
start for people from outside of europe.

Also there could be some nice "Please donate" buttons on the starting 
page. (Of course with their image files mirrored locally, for terms of 
privacy protection. At least Flattr explicitly allows that).

On 23.08.2010 14:54, Thomas Keller wrote:
> If not, who is willing to throw in some money to buy a server?

Count on me there :)

> Opinions and / or alternative offerings?

I was shortly thinking about offering some place on my own VPS, which is 
quite bored most of the day. But it has very limited hardware compared 
to the offer on Netcup, also I don't have unlimited traffic.

Are there some statistics about average memory usage (excluding Apache 
and MySQL, which are running either way) and monthly traffic? What about 
peak usage around the release dates?

So far ...

Philipp