[OSM-talk-nl] OSMF fondsen & hardware

[Stefan de Konink]

Grant Slater wrote:
> Sorry I cannot write Dutch; I am only able to write in Afrikaans and 
> English.

No problem, I wonder who pointed you on this thread anyway. Please take 
this text as constructive, it is not intended to be written as troll, 
flame or whatever. It is written between 2:45 and 3:30am so... not the 
time these mails should be written anyway.

> Stefan:
>  > Wat een non-sense; Kennisnet heeft al een jaar geleden aangeboden OSM 
> hardware te sponsoren. De OSMF heeft genoeg geld over van de laatste 
> SOTM, dus er is geen enkele cent van gebruikers nodig om dit te realiseren.
>  > Ik raad daarmee ook iedereen af om geld te doneren aan een 
> organisatie die niet transparant is naar haar gebruikers.
> 
> Kennisnet did offer support in ~Aug 2007. It took me a while to work out 
> the hardware requirements as I was fairly new to the sysadmin team. I 
> think by the time we submitted what we needed in early Nov 07 the offer 
> had lapsed. Since then the project's hardware requirements have grown 
> drastically.

Will this happen again? Because according to my potential sponsor 
counter we are now on 4 potential hardware sponsors, for NL alone.


> The OSMF did have money "left over" after the last SOTM, this is clearly 
> shown in the AGM report of August 2008
> http://foundation.openstreetmap.org/2nd-annual-general-meeting-london-1400-august-30th-2008/meeting-report/

Was grepping to my nontext-skype-logfiles to find the numbers I was 
talking about I did not find them yet though;

But please do read the text and wonder how the 14.000 euro was spend :)

  3.500 pounds; hardware
    600 pounds; legal

  unknown     ; travel costs
  unknown     ; SOTM

-----------

14.000       ; total expenses

My math system generally is only able to deduce one variable per 
equation at the same time. Even if the 2.500 euro's that were left over 
were spend on hardware we are not even close to 60%. If you don't find 
this /curious/ you might want to tell your users 6k was spend on legal 
or travel costs? Things that user group probably doesn't give anything 
about.

> OSMF needs to keep funds in reserve to fund/underwrite the following 
> years SOTM. Sponsors do pay, but normally only after then conference has 
> already passed. The OSMF also has other expenses.

Is this also the case for the Platinum sponsorship?


> Alone, since the AGM, I have spend OSM funds on the following hardware:
> 3x HP DL360 G5 Servers, 1x APC AP7950 and misc networking
> Documented here: 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/Upgrades#Upgrade_History

Are the PIII servers still connected? If so, we might have a job for them :)

> If you do have finance questions, it's likely best to ask the OSMF 
> treasurer directly: treasurer at osmfoundation.org
> Otherwise I am happy to answer any other question you might have, 
> preferred in English or very simple dutch.

The very simple question is of course: it is known to many that there is 
commercial usage of OSM data. I cannot understand and will not take for 
granted that only the minor users of OSM are willing to invest into 
hardware. Therefor the donation seems like a we (read: OSMF) need money, 
and the most easy way is to just ask the users.

Now what also was discussed on IRC; I presume this 10k will probably go 
to a 0.6 server, leaving other hardware available for other jobs. Just 
trowing new hardware to a job that is basically one single point of 
failure or performance bottleneck is not really going to help the users 
after a new data donation of lets say France or Italy.

Now I sincerely hope OSM gets a freaking Sun X4540, with 64GB* of RAM 
and decent 48 disks array. And if someone is really smart, maybe ask if 
OSM can get it for free, instead of buying it with this new money. You 
can afford it anyway now :)


...I hope this stays the only English thread on talk-nl.


Stefan

* at this amount of memory, ditching MySQL for something else might be 
an option.