kaltura.org vs kaltura.com

You are correct. You can either host the open source Kaltura Community Edition yourself, use the 10GB trial, or pay for Kaltura.com.

It would be really interesting if someone hosted a version of the community edition that members of the general public could access!

That is something I would consider to setup, since I have a lot of capacity left on my server at the moment.

Any idea what the rules on that one are (license etc)? Looks like in this case that would become a competitor to kaltura.com, and I don't think they would like that... but maybe "not for commercial use" could fix that with a link to kaltura.com?

Any idea on what would be possible on a 6 core cpu (12 processing threads) with 24gb ddr3 ram and 1,5tb space?

Here is a summary of all the Kaltura Platforms:

http://corp.kaltura.com/solutions/kaltura_platform_editions

I think you will be fine from a license point of view - as far as I can see there are no issues in their terms of use that will cause you problems.

The traps you may fall into are that Kaltura uses a lot of 3rd parties applications that require licensing/purchasing (i.e. they use some 3rd party encoders), and also have a lot of custom code that they don't release publicly. However, you could easily just set up the Kaltura Community Edition on your server, if you're not trying to duplicate Kaltura's SaaS Platform exactly. You can probably replace a lot of the missing functionality with open source alternatives in a lot of cases.

The Kaltura Prerequisities are listed here:

http://www.kaltura.org/kaltura-ce-v30-prerequisites

Your system sounds like it would be more than able to handle a fair amount of hosting/encoding, depending on what else is running on the server, and how you've organised storage on the system.

Keep in mind that Kaltura Community Edition is not certified by Kaltura (i.e. no warranty) and that all updates and contributions must be contributed back to community.

Keep us posted on how you go!

As a Drupal community member, I believe in community contributions :-) Kaltura(.org) just makes things better because in my opionion video streaming is to expensive these days for non-commercial websites.

I'll keep you posted.