Wednesday in , Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra let the cat out of the bag: After porting the site to the Google App engine, the company will release the code as open source under the Apache License, and stop developing Jaiku internally.

To many, this is the end of Jaiku. "So long, and thanks for all the fish," commented krisguy, quoting Douglas Adams in response to Gundotra's post. Paul Jacobson, commenting on , found it "a little disappointing that active development of the service is shifting away from the core team that created it in the first place...As a Jaiku user this feels a little like the beginning of the end..."

But BACNetwork, responding to , felt it was understandable. "It had to happen. How can anyone justify investing...millions of dollars with no foreseeable return."

Others were positive about the change. "It's not like Jaiku is shutting down," argued Snuxoll in . "The community will do a better job maintaining the bloody software than Google." And in reaction to , Rob Jensen proclaimed that "I love the idea of roll your own" and wondered "what microblog will become the next WordPress."

Alexleonard, posted philosophically to the Cybette thread. "If I can continue to use Jaiku and continue to converse with all the good people I've met on here, and if it starts to actually develop again, then I'm perfectly happy to see it not be owned by Google anymore."