“WebServUSB” — why pay?

I was just browsing Digg.com, and I stumbled across this page: http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2653

According to that site, you can buy a preloaded USB flash drive which has everything you need to set up a fully portable web server. Apparently this guy hasn’t heard of the portability movement, and he sees fit to pay $90-$400 for something like this. The Uniform Server (a WAMP package) does just about everything except the mail server, is completely free, and is only ~30MB. And it’s OSS — the components are all open source or free, and usually both.

Another option is Abyss Web Server — though it isn’t free, doesn’t have Apache, and doesn’t have popular scripting packages pre-embedded. It is a lot smaller, though.

Apparently it isn’t so powerful, either. Their live demo, http://demo.webservusb.com/, isn’t up — so much for “all the power of a server in a little plug.”

Interesting idea, though. But I’m not paying so much for something that’s already freely available.

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