OStatic

Software-as-a-service provider Etelos announced a new addition to its offerings over the weekend: hosted installations of some major open source projects. This is yet another twist on the perennial problem of making money from open source: supporting software that other people write. Is there really a market here?

There are many benefits to using open source software for web applications: rapid development cycles, leading functionality in many market segments, and of course the price. But actually deploying those applications can be a huge, daunting nuisance. The WordPress installation instructions, for example, may brag of taking only five minutes - but that presumes you are already running MySQL and PHP and a web server and are comfortable configuring them.