Thread:Talk:Release Management RFP/Cost v. benefit/reply (5)

To be clear, I like and respect both Marks and all five of the Consortium group. You all are great and I love the work that you all do.

But I'm trying to figure out why MediaWiki releases are seemingly so expensive. If the cost were something like $5,000/year, I wouldn't think twice about the expense. But $130,000/year? I would hope we would have some magical automated release system with lots of bells and whistles if we're spending over $100,000 per year. You could hire two full-time developers who could focus exclusively on development work to make the MediaWiki installer and upgrader better for that kind of money.

Building a user group (a community) doesn't require money, exactly. It ideally should happen organically. Yes, you can invest time (and consequently money) into this type of work, but I'm not sure it's a great idea. It also seems pretty orthogonal to MediaWiki release management. As it is, I'm not quite sure what purpose a user group would serve, but a good part of me also feels that this topic is outside the scope of this talk page.