Does hosting boost open source?

One reason Apache is so popular is that it is hosted. All users see are Web pages and menus. The only people who need to know about it are at the hosting company.

Would other open source projects benefit if they could be hosted? Bert Armijo, vice president of marketing for 3Tera says they might be, which is why he feels the release of his AppLogic grid operating system is a big deal, even though the product itself is closed source.

"It lets you fully encapsulate software and offer it as an appliance. Open source people can package their software into a virtual appliance and make it available, without the rigors of installing. This gives the open source community the chance to serve the long tail that hasn't used open source so far. There are no installation requirements."

Open source will also benefit from AppLogic because hosting will let open source applications become far more complex than they are now, when they have to be loaded onto individual servers. It also comes with several ready-to-deploy open source applications such as SugarCRM, Bugzilla, TWiki and SiteKreator.

So the biggest boost to open source in 2006 could come from a closed source operating system?