The money thing

["Aaron D. Turner" <aturner@best.com>]

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In case you haven't noticed, I tend to be verbose.  This email doesn't
do anything to buck that trend. 

On Sun, 20 Dec 1998, Roger Dingledine wrote:
  
> > On thing I should add is we need to decide on a non-popular subject that
> > will impact the design.  Ad banners or no ad banners?  I know no one
> > *likes* banners, but $$$ is a good thing when you want more hardware.  
> > VAR and other corporate supporters won't always be so ready to give
> > something for virutally nothing. Having $$$ in the bank *before* we need
> 
> We don't need corporate sponsors for this. What we need, plain and
> simple, is programmers and content contributors. That's it.

That really depends on your goal for the LKB.  If you're looking for _a_
site where people can go to get information then corporate sponsorship is
a good thing.  If you're looking for a collection of sites that have the
same data, then you're absolutely right.

The difference is, do you want www.linuxkb.org to mean something, or do
you want a distribution method simular to the LDP?  I strongly believe
that modeling the LKB as a destination site along the lines of
www.kernel.org, www.linuxhq.com, etc is a far better, less confusing, and
more effective experiance for the average user.  People want one URL for a
site, not a bunch of URL's that don't seem to relate, especially when
anyone of them may not be up to date or even a mirror anymore.

Also, from my experiance, the "master" site gets 90% of the hits and the
mirrors get the scraps.  This is just because other webmasters are too
lazy to list multiple URL's for a site.  They just list the master.
User's are too lazy to "pick the nearest site", not to mention the fact
that "nearest" in Internet terms is a confusing proposition at best.
 
> > it is a good thing.  I for one don't have extra cash laying around that I
> > can dontate to the site.  Setting up a not for profit org isn't that
> > difficult.  Also, a lot of Linux/OSS related sites now have ads: lwn.net,
> > Linux Today, Linux World, slashdot.org etc.
> 
> The ads for lwn.net at least are to help pay the workers. Not to pay for
> the site. They've had many offers from people willing to host their site;
> what they wanted was some direct remuneration for their work (which is
> fine. They do excellent work.)

Agreed.  What I was hoping people would pick up on is that with the number
of Linux related sites doing ads, there is less user backlash to sites
that have them.  It just doesn't turn people off like it used to, because
everyone is doing it.  (Gawd that sounds lame, but regardless there is
some truth to it.  And no, if my friends jumped off the Golden Gate
Bridge, I wouldn't follow. :-)
  
> > No ad banners means we have to make space on the site for a VA Research
> > logo and a NaviSite logo on the main page- neither of which we will make
> > any $$$ on.
> 
> I don't see why we need to put the logos on, unless we've agreed that
> we will. But in any case, I don't mind doing that. "This site hosted
> by foo and bar." on the bottom. Along with the webmaster email address.

The logo's along with the statement was part of the deal.  When I was
leading our group I felt that it was important to get a dedicated box with
excellent connectivity.  This seemed like a good/quick/easy way to
accomplish that.  It was also an effective motivator for us as group.

> > Remember if the site is sucessful, we will have a powerful way to make
> > money for the good of Linux/OSS.  We would be able to purchase hardware so
> > we could mirror/host other projects which need server space/bandwidth.  
> > There seems to be an enormous need right now for this sort of thing.
> > (kernel.org and the GGI-project are two examples in the past two days)
> 
> There is not an "enormous need" for this sort of thing. There are
> organizations out there like spi and seul that are happy to support
> projects based on their merit. I will grant you that kernel.org is a
> bit large for that sort of support. In those cases, there are places
> like VAR and especially Redhat, which have time and time again demonstrated
> their commitment to the Linux community. There are political issues with
> putting such a crucial site as kernel.org under the "control" of Redhat;
> but in any case there is no shortage of actual hardware and connectivity.
> I'm very confident that the Linux-relying companies would do the right
> thing if the kernel dev project suddenly needed more support.

I agree.  But just because there is already people willing to help who
have the means doesn't mean there isn't room for one more.  Also, by
mirroring/hosting other group's content, we can easily add it to the LKB
search engine.  (Gawd what I wouldn't give for a REAL search engine for
the LDP!)  And even if we don't mirror/host another site, maybe we donate
$$$ to support a penguin at a zoo.  Maybe we pay someone to write an OSS
driver for USB or something.  The fact is that there's a lot of good we
could do with the $$$, beyond purchasing hardware for the site.

> > Also, I would not expect that NaviSite will give us unlimited bandwidth
> > forever.  If we start using significant bandwidth they will expect us to
> > help offset their costs in the matter- my wheeling and dealing can only
> > get us so far for so long. 
> 
> If we start using significant bandwidth, it will be because we have
> become popular. If we have become popular, there will be plenty of
> sites willing to host us for free. The KB project doesn't really
> use that much, in terms of processing power and space. Have a bunch
> of stuff in the database, regenerate it nightly into new static html
> pages, provide search on those. That's maybe a couple hundred megs.
> And the database can live offline for all I care, as long as it connects
> every few days to transfer the new static html. I could fit that on
> belegost, or moria, or cran, or tolkien, without even noticing. Even
> with 50000 hits a day.
>
> And you say, "But having a really expensive machine on somebody else's
> network makes things easier and more reliable." I would argue about the
> 'more reliable' part (belegost has been reliably up and on the net for the
> past 3 years, with maybe 48 hours downtime total), but I ask you: is
> having it slightly easier (yes, only slightly -- we still have to solve
> most of the problems that we had to solve before) worth getting entangled
> in the world of corporate sponsorship and expected return? There *are*
> other solutions.

While I'll agree serving/mirroring the static HTML content is a breeze,
that is only a minor part of the overall utilization of the box.  The
CPU/disk hog won't be the static HTML, MySQL, Apache, or even the Perl
code we write, it's going to be Ht://dig.

Ht://dig uses a DB2 database which will be virutually unmirrorable (the DB
is generated via a spyder, hence incremental updates aren't likely to
work, even if we found a way to do it with DB2).  The DB will be 4 times
the size of the static HTML due to the fuzzly logic extentions.  And
realize that 90+% of users aren't going to "browse" the site.  They're
going to type a key word or two and click "search".  If we're lucky, for
every 5 pages served, only one will be a Ht://dig results page.

That's the bottleneck.  

The only reason to mirror the site is if we can scale the search engine;
anything else is meaningless.  Having the boxes at a single location
behind a Local Director which gives the illusion of one big box makes
scaling the system a breeze.  Otherwise you have to convince others to run
and maintain a CPU/disk intensive search engine.  At that point it's no
longer a simple mirror site, it's almost a full blown replica and that's a
lot harder sell to volunteers.  And then you still have the failing
proposition getting people to actually use the mirrors.  The result is
www.linuxkb.org is a massively overloaded site in 6-12 months no matter
how many satellite mirrors we have.

One last thing.  There is an advantage with corporate sponsorships-
immediate visibility outside the Linux community.  VA Research for
example, when we go live is going to do a press release on NewsWire about
us.  This means that we now have visibility to traditional media and those
who aren't connected to the Linux community.  Think about what that means
in terms of not just the number of visitors, but the diversity, and how
that helps promote Linux and pro-Linux compaines such as VA Research.

They can help us and we can help them and by helping each other we help
Linux.  As long as we keep that the purpose, money isn't a dividing issue
anymore, it becomes a tool.

- -- 
Aaron Turner           | Either which way, one half dozen or another. 
aturner@pobox.com      | Check out the Red Hat Linux User's FAQ Online!
www.pobox.com/~aturner | http://www.pobox.com/~aturner/RedHat-FAQ/
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