Open Source Diva named CTO Options

[anthony]

So who is this Danese Cooper? I see that David Gerard created her BLP in 2005. On that point alone I'm skeptical.

[thekohser]

I wonder if the fact that Brion Vibber is being re-hired is any indication of:

1. Danese doesn't know enough about computers to do Brion's job
2. Once you're a Wikimediot, you can't last long in the "outside" work world

Maybe a little bit of both?

[Alison]

I wonder if the fact that Brion Vibber is being re-hired is any indication of:

1. Danese doesn't know enough about computers to do Brion's job
2. Once you're a Wikimediot, you can't last long in the "outside" work world

Maybe a little bit of both?

... or a little bit of neither? Let's be fair ...

[Somey]

Maybe a little bit of both?

... or a little bit of neither? Let's be fair ...

No, let's be unfair!

I actually agree with Ms. Martin about why Brion Vibber would be willing to return, given that he'll be reporting to Danese Cooper and not Erik Moeller... but Mr. Kohs has actually made an interesting point here, as he often does. Sometimes the WMF management reminds me of kids let loose in a candy store (when they're not reminding me of Lord of the Flies, at least). They have lots of money, no appreciable oversight, no definable performance metrics other than just their ability to keep the websites online... it sounds like loads of fun for an IT person, and a helluva lot better for a dev/DBA than the average corporate IT shop, consulting firm, or software VAR.

That's not to say there wouldn't be some downside - in particular, the guilty-conscience thing could cause lack of sleep, what with knowing you were participating in a corrupt, socially-irresponsible fake-charity operation. But as it turns out, some people aren't really affected by that silly "conscience" stuff at all, so maybe Brion is one of the lucky ones.

[Cla68]

I actually agree with Ms. Martin about why Brion Vibber would be willing to return, given that he'll be reporting to Danese Cooper and not Erik Moeller... but Mr. Kohs has actually made an interesting point here, as he often does. Sometimes the WMF management reminds me of kids let loose in a candy store (when they're not reminding me of Lord of the Flies, at least). They have lots of money, no appreciable oversight, no definable performance metrics other than just their ability to keep the websites online... it sounds like loads of fun for an IT person, and a helluva lot better for a dev/DBA than the average corporate IT shop, consulting firm, or software VAR.

Ms Cooper will have earned her salary the day the WMF's main server farm burns down or floods and the backup plan (COOP, or whatever you want to call it) kicks in with a flawless changeover which allows all the wiki-activists to continue trying to save the world using Wikipedia to continue their efforts without pause. Does anyone know where the WMF's main server farm is located and what their COOP plan dictates will happen if it does blow up?

[Zoloft]

I actually agree with Ms. Martin about why Brion Vibber would be willing to return, given that he'll be reporting to Danese Cooper and not Erik Moeller... but Mr. Kohs has actually made an interesting point here, as he often does. Sometimes the WMF management reminds me of kids let loose in a candy store (when they're not reminding me of Lord of the Flies, at least). They have lots of money, no appreciable oversight, no definable performance metrics other than just their ability to keep the websites online... it sounds like loads of fun for an IT person, and a helluva lot better for a dev/DBA than the average corporate IT shop, consulting firm, or software VAR.

Ms Cooper will have earned her salary the day the WMF's main server farm burns down or floods and the backup plan (COOP, or whatever you want to call it) kicks in with a flawless changeover which allows all the wiki-activists to continue trying to save the world using Wikipedia to continue their efforts without pause. Does anyone know where the WMF's main server farm is located and what their COOP plan dictates will happen if it does blow up?

Well, a lot of information about their two server clusters is at the WikiTech wiki.
One cluster is in Tampa, Florida and the other is in Amsterdam.

I don't know anything about their COOP plan, but I've seen them manually fail over from one cluster to the other recently when they had bandwidth issues.

Edit:
Here's a Wikimedia Tech Blog entry about the failure of the automatic failover a year ago:

Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Further Edit:
They are right now provisioning a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia although I'm not sure if that's Wikimedia or Wikipedia or both.

Hey! I found their Disaster Recovery Plan! *snicker heehee chortle gasp*

This post has been edited by Zoloft: Wed 9th March 2011, 11:42pm

[Kelly Martin]

One cluster is in Tampa, Florida and the other is in Amsterdam.

I don't know anything about their COOP plan, but I've seen them manually fail over from one cluster to the other recently when they had bandwidth issues.

They cannot fail from the Tampa cluster to the Amsterdam cluster, not completely: they are using single-master MySQL replication and thus "there can be only one". If they lose the master database server in Tampa, nobody can edit until they get it back (or make a new one: there is supposedly some way to make a slave into a master, although I don't imagine doing so is a pretty process). What "fails over" are the squids and the PHP front ends, of which there are hundreds to make up for the fact that Mediawiki is remarkably slow and inefficient software.

Wikimedia does not have a meaningful disaster recovery plan; rather, when things break they scurry about like mad trying to figure out how to recover from whatever it was that broke. They're fairly good at scurrying, though, so they usually get back up within a fairly short time, and what data losses they've had (and there have been several instances of data loss, for various reasons) have not been serious enough to generate significant upset.

[Gruntled]

One cluster is in Tampa, Florida and the other is in Amsterdam.

If they have servers in Amsterdam, and if you view a page it may have come from there, why isn't Wikipedia subject to Dutch law on copyright and responsibility for the contents of these pages?

[anthony]

One cluster is in Tampa, Florida and the other is in Amsterdam.

If they have servers in Amsterdam, and if you view a page it may have come from there, why isn't Wikipedia subject to Dutch law on copyright and responsibility for the contents of these pages?

Why do you assume it isn't?

[Gruntled]

Why do you assume it isn't?

Because I find it amazing that to my knowledge, nobody's sued WMF in the Dutch courts by now if it's possible. For example, the copying of reproductions from the National Portrait Gallery would not be allowed under European copyright law, enforceable in Dutch courts. If you know of a Dutch case, I'd love to hear details.

This post has been edited by Gruntled: Fri 11th March 2011, 12:16pm

[anthony]

Because I find it amazing that to my knowledge, nobody's sued WMF in the Dutch courts by now if it's possible. For example, the copying of reproductions from the National Portrait Gallery would not be allowed under European copyright law, enforceable in Dutch courts.

I think it's quite a stretch from "National Portrait Gallery hasn't sued WMF" to "Wikipedia isn't subject to Dutch law on copyright".

[Gruntled]

Because I find it amazing that to my knowledge, nobody's sued WMF in the Dutch courts by now if it's possible. For example, the copying of reproductions from the National Portrait Gallery would not be allowed under European copyright law, enforceable in Dutch courts.

I think it's quite a stretch from "National Portrait Gallery hasn't sued WMF" to "Wikipedia isn't subject to Dutch law on copyright".

I did say For example; it was the first that came to mind. And there are all those litigious individuals like Jeff Merkey who would surely find life far easier in the Dutch courts than in US ones.

[anthony]

Because I find it amazing that to my knowledge, nobody's sued WMF in the Dutch courts by now if it's possible. For example, the copying of reproductions from the National Portrait Gallery would not be allowed under European copyright law, enforceable in Dutch courts.

I think it's quite a stretch from "National Portrait Gallery hasn't sued WMF" to "Wikipedia isn't subject to Dutch law on copyright".

I did say For example; it was the first that came to mind. And there are all those litigious individuals like Jeff Merkey who would surely find life far easier in the Dutch courts than in US ones.

So, basically, you know of several people who would want to do it, and none of them have done it, so you assume it's impossible?

I'm not even sure what you're assuming. First your comment is that "Wikipedia [isn't] subject to Dutch law", which is pretty absurd. Then you say "nobody's sued WMF in the Dutch courts", implying that doing so is impossible, which is even more absurd. The two assumptions, while both absurd, are not at all the same. A lawsuit in the US courts can sometimes be decided based on Dutch law, and a lawsuit in the Dutch courts can (I believe) sometimes be decided based on US law. It's unclear which, if either, you are claiming to be "impossible" for a case involving the WMF, in addition to the Dutch courts deciding a case involving the WMF under Dutch law (which also is quite possible - presumably a dispute between WMF and Kennisnet over the colocation terms would take place in Dutch courts under Dutch law).

I'm no expert on international copyright and international libel law. With that said, I don't think the mere fact that WMF has a server located in Amsterdam means that a US citizen living in the US and with no particular ties to Amsterdam, can successfully sue a US company for libel, in Amsterdam , applying Dutch laws. I also don't think that the mere fact that WMF has a server located in Amsterdam means that a British company can successfully sue, in Dutch court, under Dutch laws, a US company for allowing a US citizen to upload a public domain image which they obtained in violation of a terms of service which no doubt said it was to be governed under the laws of a country other than Amsterdam (probably the UK). But as I said, I'm not expert, so maybe I'm wrong. (Then again, I have no evidence that Merkey is an expert on international copyright and/or international libel law and/or that National Portrait Gallery has a salaried staff expert on international copyright and/or international libel law, so the fact that they chose not to engage in such a case means very little to me.)

EDIT: In any case, maybe this is what you were trying to say, in which case I believe you are correct: "The mere fact that Wikipedia has servers in Amsterdam does not imply that any and every case against the WMF could be decided by Dutch courts under Dutch law, if only the forum shopping litigant chooses for it to be so. There are generally other factors in a case beyond where some of the servers are located."

This post has been edited by anthony: Sun 13th March 2011, 2:48pm

[Gruntled]

So, basically, you know of several people who would want to do it, and none of them have done it, so you assume it's impossible?

No, I'm asking if it's possible and expressing amazement that it hasn't been done if it is possible.

[anthony]

So, basically, you know of several people who would want to do it, and none of them have done it, so you assume it's impossible?

No, I'm asking if it's possible and expressing amazement that it hasn't been done if it is possible.

Ah, my bad. Sorry.