On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 11:44, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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. > > No it was not: http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/etherpad-back-online-until-open-sourced > > > > 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. > > So Twitter spends a small amount of money making Tweetie for Mac open source and reap the benefits of the entire developer community being able to develop feature and patch bugs. > 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 > -- Abraham Williams | Developer for hire | http://abrah.am PoseurTech Labs | Projects | http://labs.poseurtech.com This email is: [ ] shareable [x] ask first [ ] private. -- To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
