[Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

Sat Jul 29 12:53:16 UTC 2006

On 7/29/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> mboverload wrote:
>
> >I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
> >
> >I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands other than
> >the immediate foundation.  A company that leases servers may easily give in
> >to legal challenges or other backhanded threats. We'd have to have legal
> >advice about how this would effect the lawsuit situation and consider what
> >we would be giving up.
> >
> Leasing does not necesarily mean going through an existing for-profit
> leasing company.  Many of them would certainly give cause to your
> discomfort.  A totally new company established for the purpose of
> leasing back the hardware would do just fine.  Whatever contractual
> arrangements are made could reflect the values of the community and a
> break even business plan.
>
It seems rather far fetched to me that a company with a big leasing
contract like this is going to just decide to break its contract and
confiscate its servers.  I mean, it'd be easier for someone to
threaten the ISPs providing the bandwidth (which might very well be
willing to provide a reasonable leasing contract themselves).  Add in
a few different leasing companies and it's even more far fetched.

And even if the leased servers did get confiscated, the whole point of
leasing is that not a whole lot would be lost.  The site would
obviously suffer some downtime in this highly unlikely scenario, of
course.

Anthony