Don't get me wrong - I love Heroku. I don't think there's anything better for quickly deploying a web application. And maybe I *am* expecting more from Heroku than would be reasonable.
But I still think that, for languages like Python or Ruby to be good 'first web app' starting points, there needs to be a good, easy way to deploy them. I remember when I first learned Python (with Django), and I wanted to deploy on Dreamhost. That was virtually *impossible* to set up. It's really hard to argue that Python, Ruby, or any other scripting language (that isn't PHP or Perl) should be "baby's first language" if you can't bootstrap a website without headache.
I think platforms like openshift and cloudfoundry could take this market away from heroku. They're opensource platforms as a service. At some point (when it's stable enough), then I hope enough providers will sell access to theese services. It's also perfect for hosting lots of diffrent programming languages and databases on your own server. But I think there is missing an opensource application store for deploying already made opensource applications to theese platforms.
Quite a few PaaS platforms out there offer ready-to-deploy opensource applications already. The catalog of choices is pretty limited at the moment but has been getting better lately....
AppFog (Chyrp and SugarCRM), Jelatic (Liferay, Alfresco, Hippo), BitNami (Alfresco, Redmine, JasperServer, Magento), Standing Cloud (OrangeHRM, Openbravo)
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
