I will dare to say that from what I understand from the beginning of this topic, you misunderstood the concept of “budget”, thus the initial tension. And it’s not the OSM moderation taking some of your texts out of context, is the general climate you brought by the rapid replies with the majority being more or less negatively targeting the OWG and OSMF operations part.
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Moderator of this channel stepping in. @NorthCrab, your tone verges on disrespect for the volunteers who keep the servers running, you are combative, and you are accusing the volunteers of bad faith in their responses. Further, you seem not to understand the difference between a “budget” and an “expenditure report” (aka “balance sheet”). I strongly urge you to calm down, ask questions in a dispassionate manner, and refrain from insinuating that the OWG is somehow hiding an illicit expenditure.
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Some context, this thread was temporarily locked (15 Aug 19:31) 7 minutes before I posted my entry (15 Aug 19:38) which took a lot longer than 7 minutes to write. Only after I posted did I see the thread had been locked in the interim. I guess my entry posted because I am a super admin here (I setup this instance of discourse and manage its server and software infrastructure) and therefore I guess discourse allowed me to post it. 
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@NorthCrab You and I are both Linux admins, we both map for fun, we both are in agreement that wasting money on cloud services, especially when there is physical hardware to hand, would be a dishonourable way to spend donated project money.
The OSM ops team is extremely small. We don’t have the resources (human capital, time, electrical power or even large enterprise disks) to run a large on-premise ceph / gluster / NFS / whatever cluster to store the shared data (across DCs) and backup data we store. I would not feel comfortable locating important backups in the same racks that we are backing up. Building a cluster that would survive our requirement of surviving a data centre outage would be difficult. In the past online and offline we have spent a long time discussing options for example: Establish an object store · Issue #169 · openstreetmap/operations · GitHub
Our use of AWS (and S3) is limited and is the pragmatic choice. The amount of money we spend on AWS is small and I believe justified. Our AWS costs currently being 100% covered by free credits helps with the value proposition and allows us the ops team to focus on running the many other aspects of the OSM infrastructure that require our attention.
It would be great if we could meet up and find common ground. A few times a year I visit family in Lithuania, I see you map in Poland, maybe we could meet up with drinks in Warszawa? Or video call or whatever.
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If “there is so much text” then maybe you should try to relax for a second, not hash and rehash what you’ve already said so many times in previous posts, and wait for a clarification…
I came here after having read your diary, but the picture is quite different from what I imagined while reading it.
You seem to just have confused budgeting with actual spending, which are obviously not the same.
AFAIU, the OSMF got 25k EUR in credit from AWS. The OWG didn’t get 25k EUR from the OSMF, and they didn’t buy 25k EUR in AWS credits.
Consider that maybe by replying right away you’re sending the signal that you do expect to receive an answer today. This is for sure a cultural/personal difference/preference, but: when I need something from someone at work but they’re in vacation, I never message them until they get back. Two reasons:
- I wouldn’t like to receive work-related messages during my own vacations;
- Lots of people don’t seem to understand the concept of vacations, so they end up working anyway (i.e. replying).
Finally, this:
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