[Strategic] Server hardware donation offer

[Eugene Usvitsky]

Hi Frederik,

Your position is completely reasonable and I agree with it. The
general picture is right - there are a lot of uncertain points in
Russia laws especially for situations where mapping and crowd-sourcing
are combined. Military bases are not the ones, there are large lists
of objects that should not be present on public maps - power lines,
road width and type of cover, and many-many others. It seems that
Rambler directors understand that they are getting in "grey zone" here
(and this is good since they are the first of large companies who do
so). So I can't really 100% guarantee that these servers won't be
turned off in case of some legal actions. However, we should remember
2 things:

1. Rambler is simply hosting the servers not owning any data there so
from official point of view they are (almost) not responsible for its
content. This reduces the risk of loss.
2. I don't recommend to move the whole (or part) of OSM critical
infrastructure to Moscow. I was talking about powerful mirror and
additional servers for projects that OSMF couldn't simply afford
before.

Best wishes,
Eugene.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 02/11/11 11:06, Eugene Usvitsky wrote:
>>
>> I would like to note that due to this fact, MapQuest's $50k that should
>> primarily be spent on hardware upgrade can possibly go to somewhere
>> else since we can get these servers from Rambler. Rambler is large,
>> well-known and respected company (definitely larger than CloudMade or
>> MapQuest before AOL) so decline of such offer would be stupid.
>
> I don't mean to discount Rambler, or Moscow, or the efforts of the Russian
> OSM community, or anything.
>
> But in a fairly recent discussion, members of the Russian OSM community have
> pointed out that there was a real danger of OSM being outlawed in Russia if
> we map too many military bases.
>
> Now I don't know if these people have drawn a wrong picture of Russia or
> been overly concerned; but surely OSM would not want to maneouvre itself in
> a position where critical project resources could be that easily lost!
>
> Meaning that there are certainly many good uses for hardware that Rambler
> makes available, and the offer seems generous indeed; but we can't say "oh
> let's not invest money in database server upgrades, lets' just move the
> thing to Moscow."
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>