During IamLUGlast week, John Head talked about some really exciting new things that are in the planning stage at OpenNTF. Nathan T Freeman teased a little bit about it the other day as well.
What the plan is (and as Nathan said, it is not set in stone it will happen) is that OpenNTF will offer free development hosting. When you create your project, you get a question if you want it hosted. If you select "yes", a VMware server is being setup, Linux and Domino installed, your ID file being created and sent to you within a few minutes. I think John said 120 seconds…
I think this is really exciting, it will let everyone start playing with Xpages and other technologies without the need for your own 8.5.x server. I know that I am excited about testing this! From what I hear, IBM donated an open-ended server license for this to happen.