I think Dropbox is the entity we should be disappointed in here. They clearly want to be good citizens of the community, but this is a sign of "evil megacorpdom" that rather contrasts with "employs Guido Van Rossum to work on Python and sponsors Pyston".
I hope we're able to demonstrate to their M&A team that moves like this hurt their reputation and make it harder for them to hire & acquire.
Moral of the story? Use GPL.
If only Etherpad had done so in the first place.
This is the kind of stuff that you just can't let happen if you're Dropbox. There have to be people in the company that read tech news regularly. Worst case you issue a statement that the release will be delayed indefinitely (or won't happen) due to the integration of Hackpad after the acquisition etc.
Just not answering, not answering mail etc. is the worst thing you can do.
Maybe Hackpad is a very unimportant and low-priority part of Dropbox, and marketing/PR efforts and expenses over it are so out of the question that they don't care about their open source promise. Not even replying here is a sign of total neglect; I'd attribute this neglect to persistent emergencies diverting resources and management attention, or to incompetence, but not to a deliberate "evil" intent because the only thing to "steal" is a little amount of vague goodwill.
They're probably just waiting until Dropbox Notes (which looks like a clone of HackHands now) is live.
notes.dropbox.com
Not as bad as Lightworks which has been on its way to being open source for years.
It is called "Hackpad". You might need to hack it to see it.
What warrants the outrage here? An announcement doesn't create a binding obligation with a rigid timetable. The sense of entitlement is unreal.