Kaltura, a 40-man New York outfit that got started in 2006, has launched what it reckons is the first and only self-hosted open source online video platform, a move it thinks will translate into the kind of tailwind experienced by open source firms such as Red Hat, MySQL and Mozilla.

It dreams of turning the LAMP stack into the KLAMP stack.

The free Kaltura Community Edition, out under the Affero 3 License and downloadable at www.kaltura.org, lets site owners and web developers integrate customizable video and interactive rich-media functions such as video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing and advertising into their sites.

Kaltura previously open sourced the client half of its widgetry and has now released other components that frees users from dependency on its servers, evidently to play catch-up with its competitors.

Online video is a hot market but Kaltura says until now publishers and developers who wanted to integrate rich media capabilities only had two options: either develop rich-media functionalities in-house from scratch or subscribe to hosted services provided by one of the many proprietary SaaS video vendors like Brightcove and ThePlatform.

It says in-house development is time-consuming and not particularly cost-effective and the outsource alternative "has proven to be less secure, too pricy and insufficiently flexible and extendible."

Its Community Edition is supposed to break this build-versus-buy conundrum by letting publishers and enterprises build and extend on an existing platform to customize, integrate and deploy their own self-hosted solutions on their own servers behind their own firewalls for free.

They can reportedly customize the look-and-feel; upload multiple content formats; make changes at will; interact with viewers and contributors; insert ads; and get statistical reports.

Naturally Kaltura also has paid services that include support and maintenance, professional development and what it claims are the most cost-effective ancillary SaaS services on the market including video streaming, hosting, delivery, syndication, advertising and search engine optimization.

Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces, said pricing depends on the job.

According to Yekutiel, "When we looked across the market, we saw a commoditized landscape littered with more than 50 online video providers selling similar services and trying to undercut the others' prices. It is clear, based on what we've seen happen with operating systems, databases and application servers, for example, that the market is not only ready, but desperately in need of a free and open source alternative."

If nothing else, Kaltura is supposed to sidestep vendor lock-in, which Yekutiel says is critical to government, healthcare and education accounts that need full control of their solution behind their firewall.

Kaltura's platform is supposed to be the only solution that gives publishers the freedom to combine its technology and services with any other.

Its open source code, which runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and soon, the company says, on leading cloud computing platforms, is available as a free SDK and as downloadable packages for platforms such as Drupal, WordPress, MindTouch and Moodle.

Users reportedly have access to APIs and reference applications in PHP, Ruby, .NET and Java.

The widgetry has been in closed beta over the last few weeks and has reportedly been endorsed by early adopters at a few hundred installations across multiple industry verticals serving different use-cases.

Kaltura is a founding member of the Open Video Alliance (www.openvideoalliance.org), a group of organizations, developers, creators and academics seeking to foster an open video revolution.

The company says it's got 35,000 publishers using its platform, making it the fastest growing online video platform in the market's history. Maybe a thousand are paying for services.

Accounts include parts of Coke and Pepsi and Wikipedia's Mediawiki.

Kaltura got a $10 million B round from .406 Ventures last year on top of the $2.1 million it secured from Avalon Ventures and angel investors.