Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting
eldavojohn writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is going to be giving away free web hosting from his company's site Wikia. The company announced this 'free culture' movement at the current Le Web 3 conference in Paris. They somehow received a $4 million dollar investment package from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and individual investors with no business model. Is this a dotcom bubble style mistake or just proof of Jimmy Wales' golden touch?" From the article: "Openserving will go further than Wikia's current services, by giving away hosting services and bandwidth, in addition to allowing site creators to keep the advertising revenue generated by the site. 'If we give away the bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's the business model? Well, I don't know yet,' Penchina said. The software acquired with ArmchairGM will let Openserving customers create collaborative publishing sites, combining elements of blogs and wikis."
Well I guess its not automated account generation, I signed up 30 minutes ago and still haven't received welcome info.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
If you go to openserving.com, they already have a description and tour, and its not really a traditional web hosting service. Its more like blogspot, though the details of the features are different (like the "democratic" sorting.)
if this guy can make wikipedia
That would be the Wikipedia that relies on donations to operate and makes no money at all?
I don't have any idea where they think they're going to make money -- I wouldn't be forking over my dough to this guy and expecting any of it back, but then again I'm not a venture capitalist. I do think I understand a little more of what the site is about, though.
It's more than just "free web space," a la GeoCities. It's basically a prebuilt dynamic web site. You can take a look at one example here. It's sort of like a miniature Digg. The site creator and its users write the stories, like a blog, and can then vote on them and comment.
I think the key is that the content of the sites is under the GFDL, in order to qualify for the free hosting. At least I think this is the case, because the site goes on and on about "free software and content". I think that's where Wales' master plan comes in; it's a way of encouraging people to create more free content. One assumes that if this really takes off, they'll charge for hosting of non-free materials. But in the short term, it might greatly build the amount of content that's available under a free license, and which can be incorporated into other projects, like Wikipedia and the Commons.
Really it looks a bit like Sourceforge, only for blog-ish sites rather than OSS software projects. They handle some of the site maintenance and backend work, and in return you get a free website...assuming you meet their standards. If you don't, then you can pay for hosting (theoretically, at some point in the future).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Jimbo Wales is the VC. He's absolutely loaded. Wikipedia ran for years out of his own pocket.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.