Technically they are just doing open sourcing for the most basic part. They are not starting a project, they are simply donating the code to those who want to s

Technically they are just doing open sourcing for the most basic part. They are not starting a project, they are simply donating the code to those who want to start a project with it (read the post). Being open-sourced doesn't prevent any codebase turning into some kind of abandonware. Certainly for me I have used a lot of software that turned out to be abandoned no matter they are open-sourced or not. But here is the problem, if it's a service, it's worse than abandoned. You simply can't use it. If it is just some desktop software, I can stick with an ancient version until I fill sick maintaining the running environment. For a service, that is it. So to my own end, open-sourcing it, is at least, better than simply vaporize the service (which many of Google's services have been like that for the past months.)