There was much rejoicing recently as Google announced a change of heart and decided to release the source code to EtherPad, which it had previously acquired along with AppJet and had planned to shut down.
Krishnan Subramanian at Cloud Ave was certainly happy as it supported his theory that SaaS vendors should offer their software under an open source license or at least open source their app before they shut down.
I’m not going to argue with Krishnan’s first point – in fact I agree that there is a lot of value in SaaS vendors reducing risk and encouraging adoption by making an open source version of their software available. However I am less convinced by the latter argument. There is a fine line between life …
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