EtherPad is Back Online Until Open Sourced
Many of you were not super thrilled with the transition plan we announced in our last blog post, which I guess is really quite flattering. We have worked with Google and the Google Wave team to make the following changes to the plan, which I think you will appreciate:
Context & Ripple Effects
The reversal comes one day after Google's acquisition of AppJet was announced alongside a plan that would have shut EtherPad down and folded its team into the Google Wave project. That plan drew enough immediate user protest that the EtherPad blog frames the new arrangement as a direct response — the post opens by calling the reaction 'quite flattering.'
The stakes sit inside a live debate over what collaborative editing should look like: Wave has been pitched since May as a reinvention of communication, while critics such as Robert Scoble have already argued its email-derived metaphors make it unproductive. Keeping EtherPad alive until its code is open sourced gives users an alternative path and hands the community the tool itself rather than only a migration.
First-order effects
- EtherPad users regain access to their documents immediately instead of facing the abrupt shutdown implied by the original transition plan.
- AppJet's team must now run EtherPad as a going concern while working with Google and the Wave team toward an open-source release of the codebase.
Second-order effects
- An open-source EtherPad gives third parties the basis to host compatible clones, turning a planned kill into a product Google no longer exclusively controls.
- Other small web-app teams negotiating acquisitions gain leverage: demonstrated user backlash forced Google to concede service continuity, setting a precedent for how buyers handle beloved-but-tiny properties.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, acquisition announcements for widely used web services will increasingly be judged by whether the buyer commits to an open-source handoff, making community reaction a formal input to deal structure rather than an afterthought.
The trend: Acquired web applications are being negotiated into open-source exits under user pressure, with community backlash becoming a deal-shaping force between small startups and large acquirers.