This seems to me like a classic case of a company buying another company just for it's patents. I'd be willing to bet that the main reason Google is buying Ethe

This seems to me like a classic case of a company buying another company just for it's patents. I'd be willing to bet that the main reason Google is buying Etherpad is their synchronization patent and any other patents Etherpad owns that cover the functionality of Google Wave. Google probably won't use any of the Etherpad code in Wave.