Sounds reasonable to me but I am "unencumbered by knowledge" when it comes to being a sysadmin or a "server adult". Definitely read the whole thing!

From On the Drupal Donations.:

QUOTE

As time has gone on, some folks have expressed concern about going with Dell for the servers and using the donations in a way that is not directly helping the F/OSS eco-system.

I wanted to just try and describe the reasoning behind the choices we have made here.

I agree that HP, IBM and Sun have all done good things for the open source community. I would even say that Dell has done a few things for the open source community but let’s be honest, at the end of the day, Dell isn’t an R&D company.

...

Our goal was to help Drupal get the most bang for their buck while still keeping it maintainable by our people here at the OSL. We don't have any special deal with Dell (or HP, Sun, or IBM for that matter). We're just another customer to them. However, our personal relationships, the pricing, reliability and supportability of the Dell equipment were the main factors in going that route.</p>

UNQUOTE

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