Open sourcing is always a good option. Etherpad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherPad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherPad) got sold to Google and the code w

Open sourcing is always a good option. Etherpad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherPad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherPad) got sold to Google and the code was subsequently open sourced. It's since launched a number of hosting sites providing collaborative editing services. The source code lives on, there's even a node.js port available with a much smaller footprint (see Etherpad Lite (https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite). Another good example is Mozilla. When Netscape crashed and burned Mozilla somehow managed to come out of the ashes.