I do always wonder how the big distros manage to stay alive without millionaires pumping money into them, and I guess with RedHat they have got into a position where they can offer support which generates enough money to make sure the software continues to prosper.

Well there's Debian at the other end of the spectrum where the whole thing is put together by volunteers and paid for via donations (some of them from the big companies who run Debian of course).

Though yeah, some of them do go broke. (what used to be) Mandrake has gone bankrupt about 3 times now. But that's how it should be under capitalism. The best products and models prosper and the inferior ones fall by the wayside. Capitalism is supposed to be unsentimental in that regard - when a model outlives its usefulness then... tough, find another way.

But we currently have a subversion of that whereby ineffectual business models are kept alive through protectionist laws. Like with piracy - games and films and music are copyable and distributable for free now but we're supposed to pretend like they're not so that these established rich companies can bury their heads in the sand and continue making money via a model which just doesn't make any sense any more.

There are companies who get it, of course. Valve being a good example. They openly recognise that piracy is a valid market expression and they compete with it - they try to offer a better service. Which is what it should all be about.

Exactly - there's all kinds of interesting tracking and analysis going on behind the scenes with Facebook. They know that Peter wants a fast van, and they know he's in Croydon.

But what they don't know, and what causes Facebook to crash whenever they try to work it out, is what he likes on his pizza who has the fastest van.

(disclaimer:I'm feeling a bit unwell and have a slight headache, so I can't be held responsible for the contents of my posts.)

Ultimately [what Xen said, but probably with a slightly different slant on it].


More specifically...

My post was responding to Mouse's general post, and wasn't directly regarding Facebook.




As owlface already mentioned - there's split free/paid services, tradesmen / not-for-profits, and even software & services that actually make a loss, but it's owners/runners don't care because there's more important things in the world than money, and so on.

And then there's Facebook-done-right. Have you priced up the data centre space, hardware, bandwidth, power requirements for that? It might be in the region of £5k a year, but it might also be significantly less, because when you decentralise the service you spread those things out onto everyone's existing ISP and home machines, and only need perhaps a handful of central servers to connect things together.

I'd happily throw away £10k a year on hosting costs, if it was enabling a decentralized independent Facebook-done-right service.

Money is basically just a lubricant - it helps things move/happen, but it doesn't do anything in and of itself. Hoarding it without purpose is pointless.

I really think decentralisation is the future of this stuff, but it's a way off yet.

Generally though: w3rd bro (hug)

What was that decentralised messenger app from yonks ago?

Hmm, there's Jabber which is a protocol (now used by Google Talk and hangouts and all that). You mean that?

IRC ?


Not fully decentralised, but segmented and stuff.

Nah, I'm sure there was a thing where.... Maybe I imagined it :$

10k, really?

 

Not that I fully understand how your theory works, but 10k isn't going to get you an inch off the ground if you want enterprise class gear.

 

Unless you don't believe in speed, reliability and redundancy.

 

 

the best forum software on the planet is free

and I am glad it is, hopefully that might encourage more people to use it
then I wouldn't end up on shitty hard-to-use forums
where I just give up more often than not

You're not thinking clearly.

How's that then? I just don't 'get' how you think you're going to host anything mildly successful for 5 or 10k. I've installed network cards that cost that much.

Well you're either exagerrating or were ripped off for that, but that's entirely beside the point.

For £10k a year I could have between 100 and 750 servers, running on industry standard equipment in world class datacenters.

And it's unlikely to actually need anywhere close to those numbers. Even considering redundant clusters and geolocation and so on.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06b/3709945-3709945-4202225-3722810-3722810-3794423-3794432.html

 

I don't make things up :) And we always put 2 in for redundancy!

 

Here's some CoLo prices, too:

 

http://www.redstation.com/colocation.html

 

So, figure at least £1400pcm for a single rack in a single data centre. There's probably loads of extras you'll need too.

 

But whatever, Pete - we clearly disagree on a number of things such as "industry standard" and "world class".

He won't actually be buying the servers, just renting.

Well, firstly, I don't believe you can run something that big on rented hardware. Facebook has over 800 million users.

 

Let's say you store just 500 kilobytes of data per user. That's

 

800,000,000 * 500 = 400,000,000,000 kilobytes.

 

400,000,000,000 kb = ~372 Terabytes of storage alone.

 

Secondly, even if it as all rented and managed by someone else - you're still going to pay for it!

 

I just think Pete's got his head in the clouds on this one.

Are you forgetting the bit where there's the word decentralised?

The point being to keep any centralized aspect to an absolute minimum, and not be storing anywhere close to 500kb per user, probably not even close to 1kb, but for arguments sake, lets say 5kb.

1 billion users x 5 kb ~= 5 terabytes, or 16x320gb drives - not really that much by today's standards.

Certainly within the ~£1k a month budget I plucked out of the air earlier.