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Maybe Amazon invested so much money in Wikia, the company that runs the publicly edited Wikipedia, that founder Jimmy Wales started sounding like an end of the summer car commercial. Wales launched OpenServing today, which makes software, bandwidth, storage, computing power, content, and advertising open source. That means free.

Ahem. That should have read FREE in large, comforting letters, as the Wikia press release came out looking like a fire sale circular:

Wikia's OpenServing extends the essence of the open source model - free software and content - to all aspects of web-based computing. The six pillars of Wikia's OpenServing offering are: FREE software, FREE bandwidth, FREE storage, FREE computing power, FREE content over the Internet, and GIVING AWAY 100% of the ad inventory and revenue to bloggers and website owners who partner with Wikia.
"Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago," said Wales. "People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend.

"OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident - as we always have been - that the wisdom of our community will prevail."

Business-model-shmizness-model! They've got all that Amazon money.

Wikia has invoked its newly acquired software company ArmchairGM.com to provided open-licensed software packages. The company says those offerings will be available in the near future.

"OpenServing is a call-to-action for developers that want to take open source to the next level and we are looking for volunteers to help us install and maintain other open-source software at OpenServing.com," said Gil Penchina, Wikia's CEO.

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Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.