"Being able to have access to the source, to use that for debugging, to use that as protection against changes in the business environment of Laszlo, was hugely compelling for us," Conrad says.

Pandora senior developer Neil Mix, who created 80 percent of the OpenLaszlo portion of Pandora.com, agrees.

"The nice thing about open-source technology is that we can actually go in and look at how the software was actually built -- with closed-source software, you don't have that option, Mix says.

In about a week, he had built a prototype demonstration application of Pandora and had it fully functioning and working with the Laszlo software.

"That was an extremely fast turnaround, especially since I was programming in Flash," Mix says. Typically, the developers would have had to use Macromedia's software -- an expensive proposition -- or they would have had to devise their own programming system, which would be a very time-consuming and error-prone approach, Mix says.