[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Adam Chlipala]

Terrence Brannon wrote:
> SECOND, the frontpage says:
> You can save money. You get all this for a price ... dropping as new 
> members join.
> But the fact is that you are asking JC Hallgren for 100.00, this is 20 
> months worth of service at the 5.00/month rate he is accustomed to.

Where did anyone ask him for $100?  I think I made it clear that I was 
only asking for short-term "loan" help from people for whom that amount 
is entirely insignificant if it gets back to them eventually.

> I think my question is: what responsibilities does the Board of 
> Directors have towards me as a member? I feel victimized to be a part 
> of an organization that is caught is so deep in debt for no tangible 
> gain and now they want huge sums of money. And yet they tell me they 
> dont have to tell me anything about what they discuss and decide.

Not to belittle the problem, but I can't help but chuckle at this 
bandying about of the term "debt" to describe just $5000.  I've repeated 
several times that I will pay for all of this personally if that becomes 
necessary to achieve harmony.  I promise that there will be no extra 
cost to anyone who asks not to be charged for the Peer 1 fees incurred 
up to the point when we are ready to move members.

Not to mention that every detail about this has been discussed on 
hcoop-sysadmin all along.  If you choose not to subscribe, you should 
accept not being in the loop.

> I will re-iterate my request that we get off the old servers 
> immediately to make our rental fees on the new ones count. Please 
> address this request with a yes or no and a reason why.

No.  We aren't able to do this without interrupting current services, as 
the new servers aren't ready.

> If nothing else, let us, as a cooperative, put a hard cap on the 
> amount of money that we will spend paying for a server that we cannot 
> use. Why couldn't this open-ended experimentation have been done on a 
> personal box somewhere? Apache and AFS are free software.

Because past evidence suggested that we could configure everything 
quickly, we didn't consider that costs of set-up time would be 
significant.  The issue of whether to configure the servers in 
colocation that we were already paying for was discussed either here or 
in hcoop-sysadmin, where you had the opportunity to object and 
apparently didn't.