Wales riding the cost train toward zero

Jimmy Wales is at it again.

Through his for-profit company, Wikia, the founder of Wikipedia has launched a free hosting service called OpenServing.

"It's based on Wiki software and can be sponsored," he said. "The first package we're offering is a modified version of MediaWiki, which we bought. We intend to add other blog hosting, but it has to be open source software and freely licensed content."

WordPress, with which this blog is written and Drupal, a package I run at Voic.Us, are both candidates for future support, he acknowledged. Since opening the server on December 16, Wikia has gotten a small flood of applications, which it is now poring through. The same rules running Wikipedia will be used to prevent abuse of the new resource.

Where is the money to fund this going to come from? "We're going to ask people to link back to our ad support sites like Wikia." That didn't sound like a lot of money to me. "We're pretty loosey goosey about it."

How can a for-profit business be "a little loosey-goosey" about anything? Here is how. 

"The basic concept here is given the ongoing dramatic dop in the price of bandwidth and hardware, they cost very little. I looked at the bandwidth bill for Wikipedia, for instance, and it is actually substantially lower in the last year than the year before, despite traffic growing by a factor of 4.

"We don't think it's going to cost a whole lot."

It's a quiet revolution, Moore's Law in action. The bandwidth and hosting revolution has been rolling along right beneath our feet. If Wikipedia's bandwidth costs are dropping while usage climbs 400%, all things are possible.