Feedback on secondary architecture promotion requirements draft

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 4 April 2012 12:28, DJ Delorie <dj at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Ok, giving money won't work, and the tax stuff is a mess.  Let's
> ignore that for a second.
>
> What about equipment?
>
> Consider: if a box showed up at PHX, which contained hardware that met
> the technology requirements of PHX, with a note that said "here,
> yours, no strings attached" - what would happen?  Would it be
> returned, or used?


In the past it was used. Currently we would probably send it back
unless a set of parameters were met:

1) We didn't own it. [Welcome to most nations tax laws.. computer
equipment are assets and taxable. Items at a conference are not.. ] If
we own it, we have a way to buy it for some amount and deal with the
taxes on its real versus "declared" value.
2) The owners have a warranty on the system and a way for us to return
it to them when it is done. The warranty is because a lot of that
equipment we used to get donated to us did not have any and we ended
up paying more to fix them than we would have if Red Hat had bought
them.

Now we do have a lot of systems that are colocated and their hardware
is donated to us from various peering companies. We also have rules in
place on what we will accept here.. mainly because we were getting a
lot of 256MB Pentium II boxes being "given for our use" which were not
useful for our needs. We are very thankful to those facilities which
have been able to deal with our "needs" (internetx, bodhost, peer1,
telia, and I have forgotten one or two others)

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I
recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd