Yesterday we flipped the switch and moved Jaiku to App Engine. Today we open sourced the Jaiku code base. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code. Anyone can now set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.

The same day Jaiku was migrated, Dave Winer wrote that it’s time to break out and distribute microblogs. I agree. There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other. Jaiku doesn’t do that yet, but now there’s a decent chance that it soon will.

Andy‘s put a lot of work into this open source release. A few hours ago he posted a note to developers in the JaikuEngine-discuss group. Here’s a snippet from that note.

The source lives at http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine and is reported to be eagerly looking forward to hearing from us all. We have received the following letter:

Dearest JaikuEngine users, contributors,

Wow! It's great to be free.

I'm really looking forward to accepting your patches and keeping you all up  to date on my plans.

So far I've set up a mailing list, jaikuengine-discuss@googlegroups.com and over the weekend I expect to be getting set up to receive and review patches.

If you are really itching to send something in before then, just make a new issue in the issue tracker at http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine and attach your code.

Working together I'm sure we can come up with some really fun stuff and maybe even do our part to make the world a better place.

I will send more updates soon.

JaikuEngine