[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Adam Chlipala]

Aaron Hsu wrote:
> Would it perhaps make sense to charge people as soon as they have been  
> migrated over?

This would make book-keeping more complicated, so I'd rather not do it. 
Not to mention that it might encourage people not to migrate, which 
causes _more_ work for us, not less, after a while, because it forces us 
to maintain two "worlds" of servers!

I should probably explain my original thinking behind holding back 
charges. The last time we migrated (from Xiolink to InterServer), 
docelic and I did all the set-up work, and we kicked some serious ass, 
if I may say so. ;-) We worked on it full-time over weekends and 
finished everything in about a month. I foolishly expected things to 
take about that long this time, with twice as many people signed on as 
admins. I should have remembered my Mythical Man Month and predicted 
that things would actually probably take longer with more people 
involved. ;-)

My decision to delay splitting of costs was based on the assumption that 
the lead-up configuration time would be very close to the resolution of 
our billing cycles, anyway. This has turned out to be very wrong.

However, I hope that such decisions will be right in the future. I want 
our next upgrade to be performed by paid staff with set hours. We're a 
few rungs down the efficiency ladder from that now, combining a number 
of serious disadvantages:
1) No in-person meetings or similar coordination of admins
2) Everyone volunteering is a full-time student!
3) No one is being paid, so other priorities come first.