[HCoop-Help] Commercial Site for Others / Non-member

[Adam Chlipala]

Nathan Kennedy wrote:
> I've said this before, but the co-op may be nonprofit, but it's not a
> charity.  We should be agnostic to the content our members are hosting.  As
> I mentioned before, the pledge system was supposedly intended to be a
> temporary fix and completely voluntary.
>
> We have many members who host websites for free for other organizations or
> persons that they have various ties to.  The member acts as administrator
> for the website and as far as HCoop is concerned we don't even have to know
> that this other organization even exists.  It would seriously hamper
> HCoop's utility if we did not allow this.
>   

I can't remember everything I've written in the past on this subject, 
but the issue for me has nothing to do with commercial-ness, but rather 
with providing hosting services to many people.  We have some fixed 
costs that admit no clear assignment of responsibility among members.  
Thus, we split those costs evenly.  A group of people getting together 
to use our services under a single membership subverts the notion of 
fairness that is at the heart of our dues scheme.  A group using a 
single account clearly uses less of some resources than a group with 
different accounts, and so the group members shouldn't be paying full 
individual dues, but I believe we need to account for the discrepancy 
somehow.  This has little to do with objective concerns and much more to 
do with the ideas of fairness that evolution has given our brains.