
Recently, we covered market research that found that
almost half of open source developers are focused on the cloud. As web applications make more sense for everybody, and as the software-as-a-service model and its pay-as-you-go advantages become clearer, the trend is understandable. Today, I took note of
this post on the Zoho blog, which has an interesting list of a few of the web-based applications--many of them commercial apps--that are based on Google Gears. Gears, of course, is Google's
open source project, based on an open API, for enabling more powerful online and offline applications by adding useful features to browsers. It's still very young, released in 2007, but very influential on the web.