Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away not just MediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia) but also the hosting you need to run it. And even further, if you run what they consider to be a popular website, you can even have the advertising revenue from your wiki.

The only catch is that they appear to be sort of forcing the GNU FDL on you, which could cause problems for people who would prefer some other license (like a Creative Commons license, perhaps?) and although Memory Alpha was able to get a different deal, one doubts that anyone else would — Memory Alpha is a 7-Million hits per month site which brings in some serious ad revenue.

At any rate, Wikia’s OpenServing service will be giving away hosting in a MediaWiki derivative in exchange for links back to Wikia. Not just that, but according to this article on eWeek they are hoping to become a sort of unified hosting based on open source website software such WordPress and Drupal. In fact, they’re open to suggestions, so if you are a web software developer and have some other open source software you’re willing to help them install and maintain on their servers … they want to hear from you.