Hacker News Reader

Donations are a hard way to run a business. Wikimedia struggled for years to keep the servers on. Unstable at best. I would go with a dual-licensed approach and/or support model.

A tiered support model is a no brainer for most businesses especially if the lower tiers are relatively cheap. A high-end “bells and whistles” model also make sense for some companies who use it mission critical scenarios.

View on HN

Wikimedia is anything, but not a good example of a well structured organisation. The Wikimedia organisational structure is bloated and causes a high monetary overhead. Wikimedia spent $42.1 million between 2012 - 2013. Even estimated pessimistic that amount of money would be enough to run Wikipedia for at least the next 30 years with an estimated annual traffic growth of 10% (too high on purpose[0]). And that's a very(!) pessimistic calculation I quickly run utilizing our default BI for an international HA class 5 project.

[0] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm

Before they left St Petersburg, Fl for the promised land - their costs were a lot lower and they still struggled.

It sounds like Caddy is a side project for the author, so there probably isn't time for tiered support in addition to development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com