Generally large companies will have an existing vendor that they use to dispose their IT equipment through. They will shred parts like storage devices and anything that can reasonably be resold will be sold through various auction houses.
Sticks of ram will certainly be resold, custom aws motherboards - not so much.
I have seen custom (unpublished) intel cpu parts on ebay before which are almost certainly aws's custom ones.
Almost nothing will get used by consumers - enterprise server gear is designed for heat/air speed/noise/energy cost requirements which are incompatible with consumer requirements. It's recycled only in the sense that a smaller business might be interested in it because at the end of its economic life its now cheap to buy (but not cheap to run).
I broadly agree with you in regards to server-class equipment as a whole.
Simply put, your average gamer isn’t going to snag a 16-unit rackmount blade server to game with. Not only is it supidly inappropriate for home use, but it is also wildly out-of-spec with what gaming requires.
However, normal rackmount servers - especially 3U+ units that have a decent number of PCIe slots - can be extracted from rackmount cases and put into eATX cases that can better serve them on a desktop. It’s what I have done before, to great effect. With the right heatsinks and case fans, it can end up being a moderately quiet system. Loud for a consumer system, sure, but nothing like the “Boeing Dreamliner at full takeoff power” that an actual server setup would generate for sound.
I’m Elvin from the RustFS team in the U.S. Thanks for pointing out the issues with our initial CLA. We realized the original wording was overreaching and created a lot of distrust about the project's future.
We’ve officially updated the CLA to a standard License Grant model. Under these new terms, you retain full ownership of your contributions, and only grant us a non-exclusive license to use them. You can check the updated CLA here: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs/blob/main/CLA.md.
More importantly, the RustFS team is officially pledging to keep our core repository permanently open-source. We are committed to an open-core engine for the long term, not a "bait and switch."
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to RustFS and to recipients of software distributed by RustFS a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works under any license, including proprietary or commercial licenses and open-source licenses, at RustFS's sole discretion.
Lol, maybe you should fund the RustFS team yourself or sponsor a top-tier legal team for them. If you can help them rewrite their CLAs and guarantee they'll never face any IP risks down the road, then sure, you're 100% right.
Fair point on the frequency of my comments, but there’s a nuance to the CLA discussion. Even with Apache 2.0, many major projects (like those under the CNCF or Apache Foundation) require a CLA to ensure the project has the legal right to distribute the code indefinitely.
My focus on the CLA is about building a solid foundation for RustFS so it doesn't face the licensing "re-branding" drama we've seen with other storage projects recently. It’s about long-term stability for the community, not just a marketing ploy.
And again - what IP risk does a CLA solve, that a DCO wouldn't? Like, IANAL so I certainly could be missing something, but I'd like to hear what it might be.
I’m also maintaining an open-source project and have spent significant time drafting our CLA, so I completely understand the concerns surrounding them.
While DCO is excellent for tracking provenance, we opted for a CLA primarily to address explicit patent grants and sublicensing rights—areas where a standard DCO often lacks the comprehensive legal coverage that a formal agreement provides.
It’s a common and sustainable practice in the industry to keep the core code open-source while developing enterprise features. Without a solid CLA in place, a project faces massive legal hurdles later on—whether that’s for future commercialization or even the eventual donation of the project to an open-source foundation like the CNCF or Apache Foundation. We're just trying to ensure long-term legal clarity for everyone involved.
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.
Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)
I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.
I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.
The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
I remember getting my hands on a rip of Titanic, burned onto 3 CD-ROMs in 1997/1998 before it was released to video. I used the CD burner at school to sell copies to other students, and got in trouble for it lol. Just having a copy of the movie before it was released was really something.
I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise...
They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.
I downloaded a shit-ton of anime over 56k via CuteMX in 2000. I used to start the download before bed and then watch the episode the next day after school.
Little 12fps postage-stamp-sized RealPlayer/RealMedia video files. I still have them if you want to check them out.
Sticks of ram will certainly be resold, custom aws motherboards - not so much.
I have seen custom (unpublished) intel cpu parts on ebay before which are almost certainly aws's custom ones.
Almost nothing will get used by consumers - enterprise server gear is designed for heat/air speed/noise/energy cost requirements which are incompatible with consumer requirements. It's recycled only in the sense that a smaller business might be interested in it because at the end of its economic life its now cheap to buy (but not cheap to run).
https://cloudninjas.com/
https://savemyserver.com/
https://unixsurplus.com/
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