It's in developer preview, they're hoping you tell your friends and generate buzz.

Right. You're the product. In this case, you are the marketing product. It's not always bad to be the product. Cows eat for free, right? Just a good thing to keep in mind.

Absolutely.

Honestly the buzz I want to hear is "you guys suck, here's 10 ways you could be better" before we start taking money, at which point it's "you guys suck and you're taking our money, give me my money back". I'm trying to build the service I would use, and the intent as mhicks said up above is to always have a free tier so that folks get a chance to try it out before they commit.

Best of luck with this project. Its encouraging to see a large organization that is so committed to open source taking a stake in PaaS!

moreover, paying also does not mean you are not the product.

Paying for what now? They won't host app for free, that's for sure. But I don't see how having the platform opensourced can hurt you as a customer. Whether you choose Red Hat or someone else.

Well, we do provide a level of free hosting - trying to keep it meaningful but it's certainly not unlimited. We will offer pricing plans for expansion and we also allow people to move off the platform (with their data) to another environment if they choose (see: rhc app snapshot).

We also wanted to make sure we open sourced the code itself. As you mentioned, that gives you some assurance outside of the service or any specific vendor.