What's the deal with the RCS???????
Since some in the Radio community are speculating on the RCS server I thought I have some fun today (family has the flu today so I'm home) and throw my 2 cents out. Please note all of below is just my opinion based on nothing more than my speculation in trying to read in between the lines.
Design
I think what Dave may do at this time (or in the near future) is distribute the weblogs.com namespace and community. This makes so much sense to me as I have followed Dave create one hell of a product and community. My clue (shoe to the head) to this was Adam's euro.weblogs.com blurb.
What this would do is allow Dave to realign the present purpose of the root while delegating and distributing to the new sub domains of the contiguous namespace some of the costs, the bandwidth load and some of the role of the present root.
Business case
Why would he do this? Well as Dave has stated you need people to run boxes and smart people cost money (I don't know if he said smart people but if didn't I did). Even if the boxes (servers) necessary to run the software are cheap, bandwidth can get expensive real fast if the community continues to grow the way Dave believes it can. So if Dave can realign some of the people cost and bandwidth cost and load off the root now and onto the newly forming community he can continue to grow and lead the central hub of the community.
Most importantly what better way to sell Radio clients then have the new owners of a piece of the community selling it. Remember that most of the people doing weblogs today are the early adopters. What better a group to go out and evangelize the product than the pioneers in the community.
This reminds me a little of my and my wife's family. Each of our immediate families were the first to leave the city (Newark and Elizabeth New Jersey) and move to the burbs. This migration caused the rest of the family either sitting on the fence or unaware of the burbs until exposed by our parents, to follow the birds. Our parents were the early adopters of a new kind of community (suburbs) of their time.
Cost
Now this gets a little tricky (as others have stated). Now staying with the flow of what I said above lets see. Let's say Dave is really thinking about distributing some of the namespace and wants this effort to cause growth in the weblog community.
I see this as creating an ongoing savings to his operation, while losing no control (he stills owns root namespace). Covering the cost of development with a small profit (remember a business is here to make money) would be more important than risking losing the momentum he has created with weblogs.
Remember after all each installation could mean a sale of Radio that feeds back into the bottom line. I think he is also aware that the more he builds the community the more value and clout he adds to the namespace (weblogs.com).
If you can remember back to 1994 when Network Solutions gave away .coms just for the asking. They went like hot cakes and created the value today of the namespace. Setting the price to high in 1994 would have surely killed the seedling before it started to bloom.
The number of business that will find a community server meeting a need today will be small since most will not know what a weblog is (much evangelism needed here). Especially with the economy in its present state (not much different than 1994), I don't see many ITs evaluating any new technology with their present shrinking budgets (there having problems maintaining what they have).
In my opinion the present phase of growth of this phenomemun is with the early adopters. They are creative (know how to work around things like NAT), know technology, don't need a business model to convince themselves that a new idea is important and if the price is right they find a way to make the buy even if they have to make it themselves.
But more is needed here than just buying the software. A descent pipe to the Internet, some heavy iron (servers) and a love to learn and maintain cutting edge software.
Hey look for $40..00 of my own money I write on my day off. I think Dave gets this.
11:04:13 AM 
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