On 04/10/2010 06:29 AM, Lakshman Prasad wrote: > Facebook acquired Friendfeed and open sourced it. > > Google acquired Etherpad and open sourced it.
IIRC Etherpad *was* open source from the start. Google bought the company and put its developers to work on Wave, a pale "competitor" of Etherpad. Etherpad development was "discontinued", I think. In any event, it was a strategic business move. > > I'm wondering, if, on the same lines, twitter will open source Tweetie for > Mac, and iPhone and the impending Tweetie for iPad. They might, but releasing a previously closed-source application as open source requires *significant* effort, both technical and legal. It took Sun a long time to do it with Java - I'm not even sure it was fully complete when Oracle bought them. Tweetie's not as big as Java and Atebits is not as big as Sun, but even so, there are *costs* and it wouldn't necessarily add revenue, especially since the iPhone version is now free. Of course, it's a lot harder to turn an open source project into a closed one. ;-) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://borasky-research.net/about-smartznmeb/ "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul Erdős
