Why? A company the size of Google needs to prune these kinds of side-branches of their business so they don't become bloated and unwieldy.
>They could have a division which puts these projects on life support or hell sells them to another company or even open source some of their products and let the community support them!
There may be reasons you can't open source it. We wrote a AS3/Flex to JS/HTML compiler. I looked at open-sourcing it because it's cool, but right now it's totally tied to our build-chain and tailored for our specific purpose. It would take a lot of effort to properly put it out there, and if you don't do that work, people get pissed and complain.
>If i've been burnt by google shutting down something i've made part of my workflow or rely on
Yeah, but it isn't just google. What's the alternative? A scrappy start-up that will shut-down when acquired? Everything is a risk now.
We use fogbugz extensively. Will it be here next year? Probably, but who knows. Maybe it'll be acquired by Atlassian and shut-down tomorrow.