OStatic

In a post yesterday, I made the point that proprietary software applications are benefitting greatly from building on top of open source components. This is a beneficial trend that is largely missed by those who see open source as threatening to collapse proprietary software pricing models. In the blogosphere today, there is much hubbub over rumors that Google is about to buy Twitter. Without a doubt, Twitter has become a social phenomenon (many celebrities use it, in addition to nearly everyone else), and the company has already been offered hundreds of millions of dollars for an acquisition before. But did you know that Twitter is based largely on open source components?

Of the many social networking and microblogging tools available, Twitter is the application that gets the most warm and fuzzy comments whenever I talk to people about it. Recently, Network World reported on 12 CIOs Who Twitter, and now it is out with its list of 12 Open Source Movers and Shakers Who Twitter. While some high-profile folks in the open source community tweet on a protected basis, many others tweet in public. You can easily follow their musings.

Earlier today, we reported on new financing for Indenti.ca, an open source variant on Twitter's microblogging service. Google has its own alternative to Twitter, Jaiku, which it acquired in October of 2007. It hasn't gone far on its own, but Google has just announced that it will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase and will open source it.? With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll their own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine, according to Google's post.

Identi.ca?s open source alternative to Twitter got a vote of confidence this week with an investment from the VCs at Montreal Start Up, reports Alistair Croll on GigaOm. While the amount of the financing wasn?t disclosed, Montreal Start Up Managing Partner John Stokes said the firm invests between C$150,000 ($120,135) and C$400,000 ($320,329) per deal, he says. Identi.ca's APIs are Twitter-compatible, and we reported on many of its advantages the other day, here. Check the GigaOm story for thoughts on how Identi.ca has an open source platform on which to build.