I looked into what it would take to run a public node, the server requires a ton of memory, the minimum price for such a server in the cloud is over $600/month at DigitalOcean. The process of setting it up and maintaining it looks fairly complicated, so I'd have to pay someone with those skill sets. It's too bad because the Bitshares network badly needs many more good nodes. It's not very fun when the nodes go down or are slow while you're trying to show off the awesome tech of Bitshares.