Automattic, the commercial arm of Wordpress, launched their Wordpress Support Network today. The network provides enterprise-grade support for Wordpress and Wordpress MU (the multiuser version). The price is $5000 per year, which seems reasonable. This is a fascinating business model that's been proven by MySQL and Redhat - make the software free and open source, then charge for the support.
Wordpress has been a hugely successful blogging platform, largely due to its extensive developer community - thousands of independent developers create plugins and themes to customize and extend your Wordpress blog. The New York Times, CNET and About.com are just some of the large corporations that are leveraging the Wordpress platform.
Automattic also runs two other services: Akismet, a truly excellent anti-spam solution that's free for non-commercial use, and Wordpress.com, a hosted version of the Wordpress software. Premium services are the perfect model here - they'll help monetize the platform without offending the developer community. This move is a win-win-win.
