The original “open sourced” code would still be free to use.

This was the case with the Wine project and Crossover.

Your argument is mostly FUD, you haven’t said much about Gears. Mostly that Google is bad, because they’re a large company.

Gears is an open source application, it’s far from Microsofts Silverlight, Adobes Flash or anything of the like.

If I wanted to I could add new features to Gears myself, I can’t do that with a Microsoft equivalent.

And like I’ve said, which you’ve quoted (though I should’ve elaborated on more), Google added a lot of features to HTML5 themselves thanks to the Gears project.

Web Workers, Offline Database, Drag and Drop, Geolocation and more features in the HTML5 spec were all thanks to Google Gears (Mozilla had a hand in the drag and drop spec though it was based off of the Gears one).

And then getting to your off-topic argument,

“For example, in addition to access to your financial information (which banks and credit card companies may have), Google has access to your photographs, pictures of your home, your location at any time if you use Google Maps from a phone, your browsing habits, your purchasing habits, and so on. Heck, they probably have more information on you than the government does.”

Now I’m a heavy web user, this type of information not only does Google have access to, but also Yahoo, Microsoft, Sony and Facebook.

I don’t care, it’s not like I’m some sort of vigilante, and when it comes to privacy in this world you’d be surprised.

Google doesn’t even actually own the satellite that powers Google Maps (I think they lease it), Bing Maps utilizes one of the same satellites and even several armies have access to these things.

A lot of the information Google has access to, is thanks to partners, i.e. banks and credit card companies have to allow Google to access their technologies which is an opt-in feature (Google Checkout).

And about that knowing my location thing, aside from the camera in the sky stuff, that’s a product of the web itself, in fact if the owner of this site wanted to, they could just log your IP address and use that to locate you.

How is making an open source project to extend the features of the browser and create an open standard bad?”

Backlin gave one answer. Another answer involves Microsoft as an example – html is an open standard, yet Microsoft has managed to corrupt the web by implementing its own variation. Any time you have one company with predominant control over a ‘standard’, there’s a big chance for abuse.

IMHO, Google has the potential to do more harm than anyone since Microsoft – maybe more. Microsoft was interested in controlling the computer market. Google’s intent is to control all intellectual property of all types from any source.

For example, look at Google’s attempt to grab control of all copyrighted works ever printed. In fact, the started years ago scanning every document they could get their hands on and making it available without the copyright holder’s permission. They’re not trying to get legislation to legalize it (which I hope our government is smart enough to avoid).

Or look at the amount of personal information Google collects. It could well be that no company on earth has ever had more personal information on individuals than Google – and their greed is insatiable. For example, in addition to access to your financial information (which banks and credit card companies may have), Google has access to your photographs, pictures of your home, your location at any time if you use Google Maps from a phone, your browsing habits, your purchasing habits, and so on. Heck, they probably have more information on you than the government does.

Google is extremely dangerous.

I’ve just thought about it and someone could code a shim of sorts to support the Gears API through Flash, Silverlight and/or JavaFX.

Example: It could check to see if the browser supports HTML5 database, or has Gears installed and if not it could just have the javascript talk to a Silverlight object (or Flash/JavaFX object) to store the data offline.

I’m just sad to know that the Gears Audio API, Camera API and FileSystem API never got to see the light (the Notifications API is coming to Chrome so that’s no problem), these features may still come later but it’ll be a while before we see them adopted by all browsers.

and @Joe Anonymous

Gears came out before these HTML5 specs, Google actually intended for Gears to be replaced by HTML5, and it’s open source.

How is making an open source project to extend the features of the browser and create an open standard bad?

We’ve already seen the damage Microsoft can do to a market with their control and Google is showing every sign of being just as bad. Stick with COMPLETELY open standards like html 5.