> What is the guarantee that this will not meet the same faith?
There's generally no guarantee that any service anyone provides won't be discontinued. Either (1) the service provider is prepared to jettison services that end up becoming net money losers (and thus, its services are at risk of being discontinued voluntarily), or (2) the service provider is not particularly concerned about being able to sustain itself (and thus, its services are at an elevated risk of being discontinued involuntarily).
There is not a third option.
> I am not buying into this unless they make it open source -- so that somebody else can take over when Google loses interest.
Open sourcing the implementation is kind of orthogonal to providing a transition path for the data so that what has been captured for any user can move to a new provider's system. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for that.
There's generally no guarantee that any service anyone provides won't be discontinued. Either (1) the service provider is prepared to jettison services that end up becoming net money losers (and thus, its services are at risk of being discontinued voluntarily), or (2) the service provider is not particularly concerned about being able to sustain itself (and thus, its services are at an elevated risk of being discontinued involuntarily).
There is not a third option.
> I am not buying into this unless they make it open source -- so that somebody else can take over when Google loses interest.
Open sourcing the implementation is kind of orthogonal to providing a transition path for the data so that what has been captured for any user can move to a new provider's system. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for that.