I don't know about you, be if I was the founder of Jaiku I would be very upset. You sold your company to Google, hoping it would become this great tool that everyone would be using, and then once google gets a hold of it they kill it, because they can't get it back out the door. So it dies before it ever evens has a chance. The company was Google's and they were free to do with it what they like, but that is just sad.
Then again maybe they aren't to sad, because they likely made a good bit of money on the deal.
The whole point of Free Software is that you aren't locked in by the producer of your software. It is impossible for a Free Software or open source software project to die unless no one in the world ever uses it. If I were a founder of Jaiku I would be insanely happy because the product hasn't been killed and instead gains a new life this way.
As someone who develops some on AppEngine, this is a great announcement. There is a real limited amount of documentation from Google on AppEngine and this will be a peak into what they consider best practices, etc.
I'm hearing that the 20% time at Google is being de-emphasized because of the focus on the projects that DO work/make money. Add to that their recent laying off of recruiters and hiring freeze, maybe they'll open source more and more. Yay! Dodgeball for everyone!
Actually, 20% time is still available to google engineers. That's good too, a bunch of folks use 20% to release code into open source. But, yeah, I'd like to see more code released :-)
Then again maybe they aren't to sad, because they likely made a good bit of money on the deal.