- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. It is a rather involved area. I hadn't considered it in terms of a joint work. My first instinct is to say it isn't but the more I think about it, it might be. You're correct - can't really separate out all the edits and it's all under one banner without clear separation of authorship. I feel that what I wrote earlier about violation of licence terms is still correct. And CC does work like GPL in that the author retains copyright, fwiw. In fact, that's the basis on which an author can licence things under it. But you can't revoke the licence. You can only force people to comply with the licence or not use the material. (N.b. some legal debators suggest you can revoke the licence but on something as big as that, trust me - it's not going to be the TCRF guy that brings the house of GPL/CC crashing down).
As to the money aspect, hadn't even occurred to me. I'm about Free Information (man), not filthy lucre. But... as you raise the topic, it's pretty interesting. He has a Patreon account which is bringing in just under $400 per month.
It's under the TCRF website name and stated to be for purposes of running the site.
So I'm certain that this guy has a separate bank account for it and proper accounting and none of the funds have ever gone into his personal expenses. Totally certain. But some back of the envelope calculations from me just for Devil's Advocate...
Total images and other media < 200GB based on the size of the compressed version on the Wiki archive page. Total CPU requirements for some basic PHP under low demand, probably 4 vCPUs would do it most days. Bandwidth harder to estimate but many hosting companies will just give you a combined package with a reasonable allowance and I highly doubt he's over such limits - it's mostly text with some medium to low resolution videos, ogg files, and images. Hell the very nature of the project means most of the media is old stuff that could be stuffed on a compact disc or RAM cartridge. He'll want a separate server for the database if he has any sense but that'll just be some basic MySQL/MariaDB and what do we reckon... 30,000 pages and their edit histories.... eh, I'm going to ballpark it and say 200GB tops again. The reason I don't care to exhaustively pick that apart is because I already realise that just eyeballing this stuff it's going to come to way less than the income from the Patreon. Could get something with 250GB storage and 8 vCPUs and 16GB RAM for < $30pm. Double that for the separate DB server (presuming he's set it up as a separate DB server which it's very possible he hasn't).
Honestly, if I were doing this I'd have it on Azure or AWS and be spinning resource up or down according to demand but he doesn't seem that tech savvy.
So that leaves us with a question: Where is the $200-300 spare going that doesn't cover hosting costs each month? Is it just piling up or is it going somewhere. So far as I can see he just runs this Patreon himself.
He said himself in the tweets that trying to block and ban people is the most active he's been in years. So where does that money go?
Linode seem good though I've not used them professionally. Their solutions are far more rudimentary than AWS and Azure when I assessed them but for basic hosting or if you know your way around Kubernetes, they seem decent. Cheaper than AWS and Azure as well. They're advocated by the L1 Tech guys and Wendell would never let us down. Personally I would be using AWS or Azure but MediaWiki is a basic LAMP stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP). You can just stick it on any old traditional web hosting package.
Also, you've misspoken. It wont take up 100GB in memory. Nothing like that. You could run a large MediaWiki instance with 16GB of RAM. That impacts load (number and variety of requests) not total Wiki size. Now it'll take 100GB of disk space. More like 200 - 250GB by my rough estimates. But that's fine. I'm looking at a deal right now which offers 480GB SSD storage for $35 per month. That's enough to put the DB AND the binary files and the code all on one disk very probably. If it does go over that a bit, next tier up isn't much more.
I can't fully estimate costs without knowing expected number of users. Because that affects the processor and RAM power you need. But I can tell you it's not going to be that much. If someone laid down $40 per month I'd give pretty good odds that would be enough to cover the hosting and bandwidth costs.
You can now get fibre to the home service which is symmetrical. There are probably multiple users on this forum that have something like 500Mbps up and down speed at home (lucky them). What you need is a fixed IP address. If you have that and the good upload speed yes, you probably could run it from home quite happily. You could throw up some cheap old box with a couple of SSDs in it and have plenty of resource for running it. This is presuming you weren't just running it in Docker on a box you already had for other purposes.
And as importantly, you would be able to move from your local system to a hosted solution quite easily just by exporting and re-importing the database and copying the files up. There would be a concern with DDoS attacks which you wouldn't have much defence against but maybe Null would kindly licence you KiwiFlare. Also, you probably wouldn't be dumb enough to incense a bunch of Sharties by banning people over your political views and therefore bring one down on you in the first place.
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