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Wikipedia founder to give away Web hosting
Wikia Inc. plans to offer a free online application hosting service in the near future, but has no idea how it will make money from it.
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The company will launch Openserving with one hosted application, an open source content-management platform that it acquired when it bought sports fan-site ArmchairGM last week.
Set up by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in 2004, Wikia's goal is to encourage the sharing of information. It hosts Web sites for free, using wiki software to let its customers and their readers edit the sites freely. Wikia asks its customers to share their content under a variety of Creative Commons or GNU licenses.
"Open source was the beginning. Free culture is what's happening next," Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said Monday, announcing the company's plans at the Le Web 3 conference in Paris on the future of social media.
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.
Penchina called for volunteers to help install and maintain other open source applications on the site.
Wikia received a total of $4 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and individual investors including Marc Andreessen and Mitch Kapor earlier this year, and last week received a second round of investment from Amazon.com. The companies did not disclose the amount of Amazon's investment.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
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